Mesoporous structured estrone imprinted Fe3O4@SiO2@mSiO2 for highly sensitive and selective detection of estrogens from water samples by HPLC

In the present work, mesoporous structured estrone (E1) imprinted Fe3O4@SiO2@mSiO(2) (MM-MIPs) was prepared and applied as extraction sorbent for selective pre-concentration and specific recognition of E1, 17 beta-estradio1 (E2) and estriol (E3) from water samples. MM-MIPs present higher binding capacity, faster mass transfer and higher extraction efficiency for three estrogens than the non-porous structured Fe3O4@SiO2. Application of MM-MIPs to dispersive solid phase extraction of three estrogens from spiked tap, river and lake water samples at 0.5, 1.0, 10 mu g L-1 resulted in good recoveries ranging from 85% to 95% with relative standard deviation values lower than 6.0% in all cases. Limits of detection were in the range of 0.086-0.43 mu g L-1. The extraction method based on MM-MIPs proved to be a highly-effective enrichment method with enrichment factor about 1700, which is much higher than the value nearly 620 obtained by non-mesoporous Fe3O4@SiO2, during the process of simultaneous separation and sensitive determination of estrogens in complicated water samples. Furthermore, the mesoporous silica could be expanded to imprint other compounds. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.