Deep eutectic solvent-based liquid phase microextraction for the determination of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in fish oil

Abstract

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), as the emerging pollutants, persistently enter the aqueous environment and can be accumulated in aquatic organisms; this has raised the concern that whether fish oil as a kind of fish products used usually for infants has the risk of being contaminated by PPCPs. In this study, we focused on developing a simple and effective method for the determination of four common PPCPs in fish oil using a deep eutectic solvent (DES) as a green solvent in liquid-phase microextraction (LPME) with the aid of sonication. Effects of the extraction method and DES types were studied by traditional one-factor-at-a-time experiment. Influences of extraction time, volume of DES, and extraction cycles on the recovery were investigated, and these parameters were optimized by the Box-Behnken design of experiment. The results show that DES is a good alternative for the extraction of PPCPs in fish oil via sonication, which is a robust method for dispersing this viscous liquid. Under the optimal condition, sonication-assisted LPME based on DES showed a good linearity in the range of 0.1–20 μg L⁻¹ for sulfamethazine, sulfamethoxazole, as well as triclocarban and 0.05–20 μg L⁻¹ for carbamazepine. The recoveries of these four PPCPs were in the range of 87.0–93.8%, and the RSDs varied from 1.6% to 6.0%. Moreover, the limits of detection (LODs) ranged from 16.7 to 33.0 ng L⁻¹. In general, the sonication-assisted LPME based on DES is a green, sensitive, and convenient method for the determination of PPCPs in fish oil.