Humic acid-bonded silica as a novel sorbent for solid-phase extraction of benzo[a]pyrene in edible oils

A novel solid-phase extraction (SPE) sorbent, humic acid-bonded silica (HAS), was prepared. Humic acids (HAs) were grafted onto silica matrices via an amide linkage between humyl chloride and the amido terminus of 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane (APTS)-silica gel. The resulting material was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, elemental analysis, and nitrogen adsorption analysis. This sorbent exhibits an excellent adsorption capacity for some electron-abundant analytes owing to its peculiar structure. In this paper, we choose benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) in oil as a probe to validate the adsorption capacity of the material. Thus a fast, cheap and simple SPE method with humic acid-bonded silica cartridge for edible oil clean-up, followed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence detection was established. The effects of experimental variables, such as washing and elution solvents, and the amount of sorbents have been studied. The recoveries of BaP in edible oils spiked at 0.2–100 μg kg−1 were in the range of 78.8–102.7% with relative standard deviations ranging between 1.3 and 9.3%; the limit of detection was –0.06 μg kg−1.