Determination of patulin in apple juice using magnetic solid-phase extraction coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography

ABSTRACT

An efficient magnetic sorbent consisting of benzofuran-2-carboxylic acid-loaded magnetic nanocomposite was successfully synthesised for pre-concentration of patulin from apple juice. The prepared magnetic nanocomposite was characterised by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. Determination of enriched patulin was performed by high-performance liquid chromatography. The best adsorption conditions were 40 mg of sorbent, 50 ml of apple juice sample, pH 5, ambient temperature and 25 min; the elution conditions were 500 μl methanol, pH 5, ambient temperature, and 4 min. Under optimised conditions, pre-concentration factor was 100, linearity range was 1–400 μg l^–1 of patulin, limit of detection was 0.15 μg l^–1 and limit of quantification was 0.5 μg l^–1. When samples were determined 20 times, the recovery was 93.9–102.6% and the relative standard deviation was below 5.3%. In terms of proposed procedure, the developed method was successfully applied for patulin detection in apple juice samples.

KEYWORDS:

• Patulin
• apple juice
• magnetic solid-phase extraction
• high-performance liquid chromatography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Specialised Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China [grant number 20121404110001]; and the project for 131 Leading Talent of Higher Learning Institutions of Shanxi [grant number 440 (2013)].