Development of molecularly imprinted polymer for disposable pipette extraction of bisphenol A in biological samples and analysis by GC-MS

Bisphenol A (BPA) is widely used in food package and dental resins manufacturing. Its toxicity is due to its endocrine disruptor activity that affects the reproductive, cardiovascular, neurological system and may have carcinogenic potential. In bioanalytical methods the sample preparation has been required to increase the selectivity and analytical sensibility by removing the interfering from the biological matrix and concentration of the analytes that are in trace levels most of the times. The disposable pipette extraction (DPX) is based on sorption equilibrium of the analyte between the sample and the extraction phase. It consists in a pipette that contais the sorbent phase freely between two filters. Then, the extraction of the solute from the complex sample occurs quickly. Molecularly imprinted polymer is a tridimensional polimeric network that has selectivity cavities that can recognize an analyte or a substance with a similar structure. The polimeric network is synthesized around to a template molecule and after removing this template, a selective cavity is formed. The advantages of the sol-gel process for the synthesis of MIP are the control of the size and shape of the particles, hydrophobicity adjustment and high thermal stability. In the present study MIP was synthesized and used as sorbent to DPX method for determination of BPA in urine samples by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Sol-gel methodoly was used to synthesize the polymers. Aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) was used as a functional monomer and tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) as crosslinking reagent. BPA and tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA) were evaluated as template to the synthesis of MIP and dummy molecularly imprinted polymer (DMIP) which is a molecularly imprinted polymer that uses a template structurally similar to the analyte. The non-imprinted polymer (NIP) was synthesized following the same procedure that MIP, except for the addition of template. It was made to verify the improvement of selectivity and sensibility of molecularly imprinted polymers. Although the sorption capacity of the MIP is slightly larger, DMIP has been selected as a sorbent in order to minimize the memory effect. The DMIP was characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The parameters of DPX, such as time sorption equilibrium between the sample and the sorbent and desorption conditions were optimized by chemometrics. Robustness of DMIP sinthesized by sol-gel process was evidenciated for the reuse of DMIP for more than a 100 times. The developed method DPX/GC-MS showed linearity on the range from 50 to 500 ng ml-1, precision values with coefficient of variation (CV) betweeen 4 and 14% and accuracy with relative standard deviation values (RSD) from -13.6 to 12.3%. The reference method using liquid- liquid extraction and GC-MS (LLE/GC-MS) was developed and validated, showing linearity from 0.5 to 50 ng mL-1. Althout the innovative method DPX/GC-MS has showed limit of quantification larger than LLE/GC-MS, it presents the following advantages: simplicity, rapidy and utilization of smaller volumes of organic solvents on the sample preparation step (AU)