A polyvinyl alcohol-functionalized sorbent for extraction and determination of aminoglycoside antibiotics in honey

• A novel polyvinyl alcohol-coated silica gel (PVA-Sil) hydrophilic sorbent.
• A facile and simple way to prepare PVA-Sil sorbent.
• PVA-Sil sorbent demonstrated good ability for extraction aminoglycoside antibiotics.

A novel highly hydrophilic sorbent simply prepared by coating polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) onto silica gel was used for extraction and determination of aminoglycoside antibiotics (AAs). The fabricated PVA coating is aimed to effectively protect core silica gel inside and offers good hydrophilic property. In combination of hydrophilic interaction chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, the performance of the sorbent was evaluated by selecting four model AAs (dihydrostreptomycin, streptomycin, kanamycin, spectinomycin). The sorbent was found to have effective adsorption ability to hydrophilic AAs, which was superior or comparable to those of commercial ones. Good recoveries (84–112%) of model AAs spiked in honey were obtained with good precision (<12.4%) and the limit of quantitation for the proposed method was in the range of 7.8–19.4 ng/mL.