Determination of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Nutritional Supplements by Fabric Phase Sorptive Extraction (FPSE) with High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) with Fluorescence Detection

Abstract

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) represent a class of organic compounds. Fish oil has been identified as one of the most important contributors to the level of persistent organic pollutants in foods. In fact, fish oils could contain elevated levels of lipophilic pollutants, such as PAHs due to the low metabolization capability of fish. The determination of PAHs in fish oils is complicated due to the fat matrix, which adversely affects both the extraction efficiency and analytical data quality. Target compounds were successfully extracted from nutritional supplements using fabric phase sorptive extraction (FPSE). For elution of the PAHs, the prepared sol-gel phenyl/polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) coated fabric phase sorptive extraction membranes were back-extracted with acetonitrile and then eluted sample was analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence detection. The PAHs were eluted on a C18 125 × 4 mm, 5 μm column, the oven temperature was 30 °C, and gradient elution was achieved with acetonitrile and water. The compounds were measured at wavelengths of 270 and 390 nm for pyrene and chrysene and 290 and 430 nm for benzo(a)pyrene. The method was validated in terms of linearity (2.5 to 75 ng/mL for pyrene and chrysene; 2.5 to 100 ng/mL for benzo(a)pyrene), precision and trueness (both intra- and inter-day), and recovery (from 63.2% to 102.3%). The obtained results by applying an innovative FPSE sampling/sample clean-up procedure which has recently shown its advantages in several applications for analysis of biological, environmental, cosmetic, and food matrices are presented in this work for the first time.

Keywords:

• Fabric phase sorptive extraction (FPSE)
• fluorescence
• food supplements
• high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)
• polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)

Conflicts of interest

No conflicts of interest are present.

Additional information

Funding

This study is financially supported by the Scientific Research Projects Committee of Bezmialem Vakif University (BAP, 6.2017/14). This article is inspired by the Sample Preparation Task Force and Network, supported by the Division of Analytical Chemistry of the European Chemical Society.