Fabric phase sorptive extraction for simultaneous observation of four penicillin antibiotics from human blood serum prior to high performance liquid chromatography and photo-diode array detection

Abstract

Fabric phase sorptive extraction (FPSE), a current and up-to-date technique of solid sorbent-based microextraction, is regarded to be the basis of the development and advancement of an environmentally friendly, simple, sensitive, trustworthy, and fast analytical method by making use of high performance liquid chromatography and photo-diode array detection (HPLC-PDA) for the concurrent determination of four penicillin antibiotics residues (benzylpenicillin, cloxacillin, dicloxacillin and oxacillin) in human blood serum. By means of FPSE, the sophisticated material properties of sol-gel derived extraction and microextraction sorbents and the rich surface chemistry of an inherent porous and hydrophilic cellulose fabric substrate are successfully combined, leading to a flexible microextraction device which is characterized by high efficiency in extracting target analytes directly from complex sample matrices. Solvent evaporation and reconstitution steps, which are considered to be rather time-consuming, were eradicated successfully from the sample preparation workflow, organic solvent consumption was brought to a minimum while protein precipitation was assessed as impractical. Thus, FPSE complies with all green analytical chemistry (GAC) criteria. The microextraction device is characterized by a very high chemical and solvent stability owing to the strong chemical bonds formed between the sol–gel sorbent and the substrate. Thus, any organic solvent/solvent mixture can serve as the eluent/back-extraction solvent. Herein, sol-gel poly(tetrahydrofuran) coated FPSE membrane provided optimum extraction sensitivity for the selected penicillin antibiotics, which were analyzed using an RP-HPLC method, validated in terms of sensitivity, linearity, accuracy, precision, and selectivity. For all four penicillin antibiotics, the limit of detection and the limit of quantitation were 0.15 ng/μL and 0.5 ng/μL, respectively.