Determination of Melamine Using Magnetic Molecular Imprinted Polymers and High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Abstract

A novel method using magnetic molecular imprinting polymers (MMIP) specific for recognizing, separating, and extracting melamine in bovine milk was developed with an external additive magnetic shelf in this paper. The MMIP was synthesized with Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles and molecular imprinted polymer synthesis technology. With the help of an elution step using methanol/acetic acid mixture elution, the melamine could be collected and concentrated. By using high performance liquid chromatography combined with this pretreatment technique, the analytes eluted from the magnetic polymers can be determined. This extraction method was validated by analysis of incurred bovine milk matrix. The proposed method simplified the procedures of classical solid-phase extraction method and improved the reliability of method. The obtained recoveries of this method were in the range of 85.04–105.2% in spiked milk samples. The limit of detection (LOD) was below 29.2 ng g⁻¹.

Keywords:

• High-performance liquid chromatography
• Magnetic molecular imprinted polymer
• Melamine
• Pretreatment

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31171890, 30771425).