Determination of phenyl urea pesticides in apple juice by HPLC-DAD employing sol-gel carbowax 20 M modified fabric phase sorptive extraction membranes

Abstract

Fabric phase sorptive extraction (FPSE) has established itself as a powerful tool for pesticide residue monitoring in food analysis. In this work, FPSE employing sol-gel carbowax 20 M modified cellulose membranes was combined with high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) for the determination of a number of widely used phenyl urea herbicides (i.e., chlorbromuron, isoproturon, monolinuron, and linuron) in fruit juice samples for the first time. The choice of the extraction medium, extraction time, stirring rate, sample volume, and ionic strength, as well as the elution solvent type and volume and elution time were optimized. The proposed method was validated in terms of linearity, trueness, sensitivity, selectivity, and precision. The limit of detection was found to be 0.6 ng mL⁻¹ for all investigated pesticides. Moreover, the trueness, expressed as recovery rate, ranged from 84.5 to 109.8 % for intra-day and from 94.5 to 113.5 % for intra-day measurements. The proposed method exhibited a green character and good practicality, while the FPSE membranes were found to be reusable for at least 20 times. Finally, the developed approach was used for the analysis of commercial samples, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach.