Sensitive determination of polychlorinated biphenyls from beverages based on switchable solvent microextraction: A robust methodology

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are a kind of hazardous persistent organic contaminants and widely present in nature due to large consumption in the past. Although PCBs have been banned in many countries of the world, they are still present at trace level in food and water samples. It is of significant value to establish reliable enrichment and detection method. Based on the conversion of the hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity from heptanoic acid under alkali and acid, increasing the contact area between heptanoic acid and PCBs, a new switchable solvent micro-extraction method for PCBs from beverages was developed with good extraction efficiency using heptanoic acid as the extractant prior to gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/ MS). The key parameters that had impact on enrichment of PCBs were investigated in detail. Under the optimal conditions, a good linearity can be achieved in a concentration range of 0.01-20 mu g L-1 with the correlation coefficients of 0.9978-0.9994. Limits of detection for PCB28, PCB53, PCB206 were 3 ng L-1 and PCB118 was 5 ng L-1 while other target PCBs were 2 ng L-1. Intra-day and inter-day precisions were in the range of 1.9-4.2% and 2.1-4.2%(relative standard deviation, RSD, n = 6), respectively. The real sample spiked recoveries of the targets were in the range of 93.2-114.3% (n = 3). The enrichment factors were in the range of 16.2-17.9. The results proved that this method was reliable for monitoring trace PCBs in beverage samples and will help for future assessments of impacts on human and animal health.