Polyoxometalate incorporated polymer monolith microextraction for highly selective extraction of antidepressants in undiluted urine

In this work, a polyoxometalate (POM) incorporated polymer monolith microextraction (PMME) was successfully proposed and employed in the selective extraction of basic antidepressants in undiluted urine sample. This hybrid monolith exhibited strong cation-exchange interaction (SCX) with positively charged antidepressants when pH was 3.0, because of the multiple ionizable moieties on polyanionic POM. As such, antidepressants in complex sample matrices were efficiently extracted by the monolith, and the matrix effect was significantly reduced. In addition, due to the high amount of anionic POM, the monolith exhibited remarkable extraction capacities for target antidepressants ranging from 4.7 to 5.8 mg/g. Further, the POM incorporated PMME was coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet (HPLC-UV). Thus, antidepressants in undiluted urine sample was efficiently extracted under optimized extraction conditions online. The limits of detection (LODs) for the target antidepressants ranged from 0.7 to 1.4 ng/mL, and the linear range was 5-1000 ng/mL with determination coefficients (R-2) higher than 0.9960. The recoveries ranged from 86.8% to 104.0% with relative standard deviations (RSDs) of 0.4-10.1%. The proposed procedure was successfully applied to determine antidepressant in human urine. Taken together, the developed method presented a new strategy for the analysis of basic drugs in undiluted urine sample, which could be used for monitoring medicines in pharmacokinetic analysis.