Development of CO₂-Mediated Switchable Hydrophilicity Solvent-Based Microextraction Combined with HPLC-UV for the Determination of Bisphenols in Foods and Drinks

Abstract

In traditional dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction procedures, both extraction and dispersive solvents are required, and thus, it increases the consumption of organic solvent. Herein, we reported a CO₂-mediated switchable hydrophilicity solvent-based microextraction (SHS-BME) for the determination of bisphenol compounds (BPCs) in complex milk and drink samples. N,N-Dimethylcyclohexylamine was used as a switchable hydrophilicity solvent; it can switch reversibly between one form that is miscible with water and another that forms a biphasic mixture with water, and thus allow extraction of the analytes in a homogeneous phase without dispersive solvent. Several important parameters were screened and optimized by single factor experiments and central composite design as follows: 782 μL of switchable solvent, 375 μL of NaOH solvent, and 1.1:1 switchable solvent/water (v/v). Under the optimized SHS-BME conditions, the limit of detections (LODs) for BPCs in milk, orange juice, and energy drink samples were in the range of 0.27–0.40 μg L⁻¹ for BPE, 0.17–0.30 μg L⁻¹ for BPA, and 0.50–0.67 μg L⁻¹ for BPB, respectively, and the extraction recoveries for BPCs were in the range of 79.5–103.4% in milk, of 84.5–97.5% in orange juice, and of 91.9–101.2% in energy drinks. The precision of the method, based on relative standard deviations (RSDs), ranged from 1.7 to 4.8% and from 2.1 to 5.7% for intra-day and inter-day comparisons, respectively. In total, this SHS-BME method possesses many advantages, such as high extraction recovery and high detection sensitivity (low LODs and RSDs), no requirement of dispersive solvent, simple operational procedure, reducing the pretreatment time and workload, and so on. Therefore, it has a great potential application value for detection of trace BPCs in routine food tests.