Facile Preparation of Magnetic COF-on-COF for Rapid Adsorption and Determination of Sulforaphane from Cruciferous Vegetables

Abstract

Sulforaphane (SFN) is a natural isothiocyanate compound widely abundant in cruciferous vegetables with multiple bioactive functions. However, traditional analytical methods for the extraction and determination of SFN are cumbersome, time-consuming, and low sensitivity with large amounts of organic solvents. Herein, novel magnetic COF-on-COFs (MB-COFs) were fabricated using Fe3O4 as a magnetic core and COFs-1 grown with COFs-2 as a shell, and they were used as efficient adsorbents of magnetic dispersive solid-phase extraction for rapid quantification of SFN in cruciferous vegetables by combining with HPLC-MS/MS. At the optimal ratio of COFs-1 to COFs-2, MB-COFs had a spherical cluster-like structure and a rough surface, with a sufficient magnetic response for rapid magnetic separation (1 min). Due to the introduction of Fe3O4 and COFs-2, MB-COFs exhibited outstanding extraction efficiencies for SFN (92.5–97.3%), which was about 18–72% higher than that of the bare COFs. Moreover, MB-COFs showed good adsorption capacity (Qm of 18.0 mg/g), rapid adsorption (5 min) and desorption (30 s) to SFN, and favorable reusability (≥7 cycles) by virtue of their unique hierarchical porous structure. The adsorption kinetic data were well fitted by the pseudo-second-order, Ritchie-second-order, intra-particle diffusion, and Elovich models, while the adsorption isotherm data were highly consistent with the Langmuir, Temkin, and Redlich–Peterson models. Finally, under the optimized conditions, the developed method showed a wide linear range (0.001–0.5 mg/L), high sensitivity (limits of quantification of 0.18–0.31 μg/L), satisfactory recoveries (82.2–96.2%) and precisions (1.8–7.9%), and a negligible matrix effect (0.82–0.97). Compared to previous methods, the proposed method is faster and more sensitive and significantly reduces the use of organic solvents, which can achieve the efficient detection of large-scale samples in practical scenarios. This work reveals the high practical potential of MB-COFs as adsorbents for efficient extraction and sensitive analysis of SFN in cruciferous vegetables.