A molecularly imprinted polymer for the selective solid-phase extraction of dimethomorph from ginseng samples

• This method employing butanone and N-heptane as porogen.
• The porogen is a moderately polar solvent that can be micron grade microspheres.
• This method combined the advantages of MIP and SPE and applied it to ginseng.
• This paper offered a new method to determine other analyte in different samples.

A molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) was synthesized and evaluated to selectively extract dimethomorph from ginseng samples. Dimethomorph molecularly imprinted polymers with template to monomer molar ratios were contrived and developed via precipitation polymerization employing methacrylic acid as functional monomer, ethylene dimethacrylate as cross-linker and butanone:N-heptane (7:3, v:v)as porogen. The LOD (limit of detection) of this method was 0.002 mg kg−1, and the LOQ (limit of quantification) was 0.005 mg kg−1. The different spiked level of ginseng was 0.1 mg kg−1, 1.0 mg kg−1, 5.0 mg kg−1, and the average recovery of dimethomrph was 89.2–91.6%. Under the optimized condition, good linearity was obtained from 0.01 to 5 mg kg−1 (r2 ≥ 0.9997) with the relative standard deviations of less than 3.20%. This proposed MISPE-GC procedure eliminated the effect of template leakage on quantitative analysis and could be applied to direct determination of dimethomrph in ginseng samples.