Imprinted nanospheres based on precipitation polymerization for the simultaneous extraction of six urinary benzene metabolites from urine followed by injector port silylation and gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometric analysis.

Abstract In the present communication, uniformly sized molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) as nanospheres were synthesized based on precipitation polymerization using dual-template imprinting approach and used it as sorbent for solid phase extraction of six urinary benzene metabolites (UBMs). This approach in combination with injector port silylation (IPS) has been used for the quantitative determination of these UBMs by gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The MIP was synthesized by using t,t -muconic acid ( t,t -MA) and 1,2,4-trihydroxybenzene (THB) as templates, methacrylic acid (MAA) as a monomer, ethyleneglycoldimethacrylate (EGDMA) as crosslinker, acetonitrile and dimethylsulphoxide as a porogen and azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN) as an initiator. The factors affecting the performance of polymer and IPS were investigated and optimized for the simultaneous determination of UBMs in urine. Binding study of imprinted and non-imprinted polymer (NIP) shows that, MIP possesses higher affinity in comparison to NIP for these analytes. Under the optimum conditions, the method developed was found to be linear with regression coefficients falls in the range of 0.9721–0.9988 for all the analyzed metabolites. The percent recovery of the metabolites analyzed in urine was found to be in the range of 76–89%, while the limit of detection and limit of quantification were found to be in the range of 0.9–9.1 ng mL −1 and 2.8–27 ng mL −1 respectively. The validated method was successfully applied to the real urine samples collected from different groups (kitchen workers, smokers and petroleum workers) and found that the developed method has been promising applications in the routine analysis of urine samples of benzene exposed population.