Sensitive determination of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in water and milk by effervescence-enhanced switchable hydrophilic-hydrophobic solvent-based salting-out microextraction and high-performance liquid chromatography with photodiode array detection (HPLC-PDA)

Abstract

Here is reported effervescent reaction-enhanced switchable hydrophilic-hydrophobic solvent-based salting-out microextraction (ERSSM) with high-performance liquid chromatography with photodiode array detection (HPLC-PDA) for the preconcentration, extraction, and trace-level determination of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in milk and water. The important variables were rigorously optimized to be 150 µL of hexanoic acid as the extraction solvent, 400 µL of Na₂CO₃ as the alkaline source, 350 µL of H₂SO₄ solution as the acid source, and NaCl as the salting-out agent. The optimized conditions provided a linear range from 0.2 to 50 µg L⁻¹ with limits of detection and quantitation from 0.026 to 0.085 µg L⁻¹ and 0.087 to 0.28 µg L⁻¹ for six PBDEs. The intra-day and inter-day precision values were from 2.48% to 6.75%, and the fortified recoveries for PBDEs were between 78.06% and 103.07% in water and milk samples. The developed procedure avoids the use of a traditional organic disperser and mechanical mixing allowing the determination of PBDEs outdoors by synchronous extraction method and high efficiency for the analytes. These advantages suggest a high potential for the routine monitoring of PBDEs in liquid food and environmental samples.

Keywords:

• Effervescent reaction
• high-performance liquid chromatography with photodiode array detection (HPLC-PDA)
• medium fatty acids
• polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs)
• switchable hydrophilic-hydrophobic solvent

Authors’ contributions

Jingjing Gu: Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Writing original draft. Yanyan Li: Formal analysis, Resources, Writing review & editing. Chunyang Chen: Formal analysis, Writing review & editing. Tingting Liu: Data curation, Validation. Xuedong Wang: Conceptualization, Writing review & editing, Funding acquisition.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest involving this work.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Foundation of China (21876125), Zhejiang Province Public Welfare Technology Application Research Project (LGF22B070003), Science and Technology Project of Wenzhou City (S20210002), Jiangsu Provincial Key Research and Development Program (BE2022733), and Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (SJCX22-1557).