Trends in liquid-phase microextraction, and its application to environmental and biological samples

Liquid phase microextraction (LPME) is a popular technique for sample pretreatment before the trace determination of target compounds from complex matrices, examples being pesticides in environmental and food samples, or drug residuals in biological samples such as blood or urine. LPME is simple, affordable, easy to operate, and highly sensitive. It is a miniaturized implementation of conventional liquid-liquid extraction in which only a few microliters of solvents are used instead of several hundreds of milliliters. This review focuses on newly developed LPME-based techniques, their application to environmental and biological samples, on their limitations, and on future applications.