Ultrasound assisted ionic liquid dispersive liquid phase extraction of lovastatin and simvastatin: A new pretreatment procedure

A fast and novel sample preparation procedure: ultrasound assisted ionic liquid (IL) dispersive liquid extraction for the concentration of lovastatin and simvastatin in aqueous samples was developed. An IL ([C6MIM][PF6]) was used as the extraction solvent, and the factors affecting the extraction efficiency such as initial temperature, the volume of IL, pH of water samples, cooling time, and salt concentration were optimized. In combination with HPLC-UV, both lovastatin and simvastatin exhibited a good linear range of 1-100 ng/mL. The limits of detection (LODs) of lovastatin and simvastatin were 0.17 and 0.29 ng/mL, respectively. Precisions of the proposed method (RSDs, n = 9) were 4.12 and 4.52%, respectively. This method has been successfully applied for the analysis of target compounds in three real water samples and good spiking recoveries were obtained in the range of 90.0 - 102.2% for lovastatin and 80.5-112.0% for simvastatin. These results indicated that ultrasound assisted IL dispersive liquid phase extraction would have good application prospect in the pretreatment of environmental samples.