A self-assembly pipette tip graphene solid-phase extraction coupled with liquid chromatography for the determination of three sulfonamides in environmental water

Abstract

A sensitive, economical, and miniaturized self-assembly pipette tip graphene solid-phase extraction (PT-G-SPE) coupled with liquid chromatography fluorescence detection (LC-FD) was developed for rapid extraction and determination of three sulfonamide antibiotics (SAs) in environmental water samples. The PT-G-SPE cartridge, assembled by packing 1.0mg of graphene as sorbent into a 100μL pipette tip, showed high adsorption capacity for the SAs owing to the large surface area and unique structure of graphene. The factors that affected the extraction efficiency of PT-G-SPE, including sample volume, pH, sorbent amount, washing solvent and eluent solvent were optimized. Good linearity for SAs was obtained in a range of 2-4000pgmL(-1) with correlation coefficients (r(2))≥0.9993. The recoveries of the SAs at three spiked levels ranged from 90.4% to 108.2% with relative standard deviations (RSD)≤6.3%. In comparison with other sorbents such as C18, HLB, SCX, PCX, and multiwalled carbon nanotubes, one advantage of using graphene as sorbent of pipette tip solid-phase extraction (PT-SPE) was that PT-G-SPE could adsorb larger sample volume (10mL) at a small amount of sorbent (1mg) and low solvent consumption with good extraction efficiency, which not only increased the fraction of analytes to LC and the sensitivity of SAs determination, but also reduced the cost and pollution.

Keywords: Environmental water; Liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection; Pipette tip graphene solid-phase extraction; Sulfonamide antibiotics.