Melamine-based porous organic polymers inline solid phase extraction coupled with high performance liquid chromatography for the analysis of phytohormones in juice samples

A melamine-based porous organic polymer (mPMF) was synthesized as solid phase extraction (SPE) adsorbent for inline SPE-high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-ultraviolet detector (UV) analysis of five phytohormones. Melamine contributed to the rich π-electron and N-containing triazine structure for mPMF, which could form π-π interaction and intermolecular hydrogen bond with COOH containing phytohormones. The synthesized mPMF adsorbent shows extremely high extraction efficiency for five target analytes (>80%) including salicylic acid, indole-3-acetic acid, abscisic acid, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 1-naphthalene acetic acid. The factors affecting extraction of the target phytohormones were investigated and the optimized experimental conditions were established. The linear range was 0.2–100 μg/L with the limits of detection in the range of 0.06–0.11 μg/L for five target phytohormones. The developed method of mPMF-inline-SPE-HPLC-UV was applied for the analysis of trace target phytohormones in tomato and grape juice samples, and the recovery in the range of 83.1–116% and 87.2–121% was obtained for the spiked tomato and grape juice, respectively. This method has the advantages of high sensitivity and good reproducibility, and it has good application potential for the analysis of phytohormones in fruit samples. Moreover, inline analysis avoided the problems of sample pollution and sample loss, and provided a sample throughput of 5/h.