Rapid fabrication of molecularly imprinted polymer fibers for solid phase microextraction of bisphenol A

Abstract

The rapid preparation of molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) fibers was reported using bisphenol A (BPA) as the template molecular, acetonitrile (ACN) as the porogenic solvent, α-methacrylic acid (MAA) as the functional monomer, ethylene dimethacrylate (EDMA) as the crosslinker, and azodiisobutyronitrile (AIBN) as the thermal initiator. It was carried out within a capillary of 530 µm inner diameter (I. D.) by microwave irradiation in 7 min. The resulted BPA-MIP fibers were pushed out from the capillary, eluted in a vial and inserted in the capillary again followed by the application of the solid phase microextraction (SPME) procedure. The extraction performance was investigated in detail by varying the molar ratios between the template and the monomer (BPA/MAA), the concentration of NaCl, the extraction and desorption time, the pH value and the desorption solvents. The selectivity of the prepared MIP and non-molecularly imprinted polymer (NIP) fibers was comparatively evaluated by selecting two structurally-related compounds, phenol (P) and 4-phenylphenol (PP), and non-analogue dicyandiamide (DCD). The established method was successfully applied for the pretreatment and determination of BPA from beverage samples coupled to high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Under the optimal conditions, the linear range of BPA was 10-400 µg/L; the detection limit (LOD) was 0.45 µg/L and the recoveries spiked in the mineral water were 88.4%-102. 8%. The results demonstrated that the developed method can determine BPA in real samples with some advantages of simple pretreatment, rapid analysis, low limit of detection and low consumption of materials.