Liquid-Phase Microextraction Approaches for Preconcentration and Analysis of Chiral Compounds: A Review on Current Advances

Abstract

Chirality is a critical issue in pharmaceutics, forensic chemistry, therapeutic drug monitoring, doping control, toxicology, or environmental investigations as enantiomers of a chiral compound can exhibit different activities, i.e., one enantiomer can have the desired effect while the other one can be inactive or even toxic. To monitor enantioselective metabolism or toxicokinetic/toxicodynamic mechanisms in extremely low content in biological or environmental matrices, sample preparation is vital. The present review describes current status of development of liquid-phase microextraction approaches such as hollow fiber liquid-phase microextraction (HF-LPME), electromembrane extraction (EME), dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME), and supramolecular solvent-based microextraction (SSME), used for sample preparation of enantiomers/chiral compounds. The advantages and limitations of the above techniques are discussed. Attention is also focused on chiral separation approaches commonly applied to study the stereo-selective metabolism or toxicokinetic/toxicodynamic mechanisms of enantiomers in the biological and environmental samples.

Keywords:

• Chiral compounds
• enantiomer separation
• enantioselective metabolism
• liquid-phase microextraction
• toxicokinetic/toxicodynamic mechanisms

Disclosure statement

Authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Iran National Science Foundation (INSF) under Grant number 95833982; and the Research Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic under Grant number ITMS2014+: 313011V446; and the Slovak Research and Development Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic under Grant number APVV-19-0476.