LAUSR

Monitoring the residual toxicant concentrations in foods is the key step for minimizing potential hazards. The huge interest about food contamination and exposure to endocrine disruptors such as Bisphenol A has emerged the development of sensitive analytical methodologies to guarantee the safety and quality of foods. In this work, a green molecularly imprinted solid phase extraction protocol coupled with HPLC-UV was optimized following the principles of Green Analytical Chemistry. An imprinted sol-gel silica-based hybrid inorganic-organic polymeric sorbent was used to monitor the leaching of bisphenol A from different packaging materials (glass vessels, cans and polypropylene containers) in walnuts stored within a period of six months at 25°C and 4°C. Extraction parameters including loading time (5-20 min), solvent type (acetonitrile, ethanol, methanol, acetone, acetonitrile:methanol, 50:50, v/v) and elution flow rate (0.2 - 1 mL/min) were optimized with one-factor-at-a-time method. The selected extraction optimum parameters incorporated elution with acetonitrile at 0.2 mL/min flow rate, for 10 min sample holding time. The imprinting factor was equal to 4.55 ± 0.26 (n = 3). The optimized method presented high recovery (94.3% ± 4.2, n = 3), good linearity (> 0.999), intra-assay repeatability (90.2-95.6%, n = 3) and inter-assay precision (86.7-93.1%, n = 3). This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.