The frequent, sometimes illegal, use of antibiotics for therapeutic and prophylactic purposes in dairy cattle management may cause residues in milk. Because of problems concerning bacterial resistance or allergies in consumers, monitoring of residues is required. In spite of the huge development of analytical instrumentation during recent years, sample preparation is still a bottleneck of the analytical process. In this regard, efforts have been directed towards improving selectivity during extraction and clean-up of samples. Compared to traditional sorbents, molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are excellent materials to provide selectivity for sample pretreatment. This review presents the application of MIPs as effective sorbents for separation, clean-up, pre-concentration and analysis of different antibiotics in milk.
Keywords: Antibiotics; milk; molecularly imprinted polymer; solid-phase extraction.