A stable mesoporous metal-organic framework as highly efficient sorbent of dispersive micro solid-phase extraction for the determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons by HPLC

Owing to the large molecular sizes of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, their adsorption using microporous sorbents leads to a low adsorption capacity. Here, to increase the extraction capacity and detection sensitivity of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a highly efficient dispersive micro solid-phase extraction method was developed based on a stable mesoporous metal-organic framework named Jilin University China 48. Jilin University China 48 is a super hybrid with large one-dimensional hexagonal nanotube-like channels of 24.5 × 27.9 Å, which exhibits high potential to be an efficient sorbent of dispersive micro solid-phase extraction to adsorb polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. By combining with high-performance liquid chromatography, a sensitive method was developed for the determination of seven polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The synthesized Jilin University China 48 exhibited excellent characteristics of stability, good morphology, large surface area, and open adsorption sites. Under the optimized extraction conditions, better extraction results were obtained than that of other methods reported previously. The proposed method exhibited high sensitivity with the limit of detections in the range of 0.021–0.13 ng/mL, good linearity in the range of 0.068–50 ng/mL with related coefficients of >0.9988, satisfactory precision with relative standard deviation of <4.3%, and adequate recoveries between 85.8 to 109.55% for all the target compounds.