A simple approach for the preparation of simazine molecularly imprinted nanofibers via self-polycondensation for selective solid-phase microextraction

• A molecularly imprinted polysiloxane nanofiber was synthesized and used as a SPME coating for the extraction of simazine.
• The fiber was fabricated on a stainless steel wire in a simple single step procedure at room temperature.
• The SPME fiber showed good selectivity and high extraction efficiency for simazine and its analogous compounds.
• The extraction efficiency of imprinted and non-imprinted fibers for dissimilar compounds to simazine was almost the same.

A novel molecularly imprinted sol-gel material based on polysiloxane nanofiber was introduced as a solid-phase microextraction coating on a stainless steel wire for the extraction of simazine. The nanostructured molecularly imprinted fiber was prepared by a simple single step method at room temperature, using methyltriethoxysilane as the sol-gel precursor and simazine as the template molecule. The fiber was applied for the extraction of simazine in different water samples followed by gas chromatography and mass spectrometry detection. The extraction capacity of the molecularly imprinted fiber was 8 ng, and it had better extraction efficiency than the non-imprinted fiber and commercial fibers (PDMS and PA). The fiber had also a good selectivity for simazine and its analogous compounds. Important parameters affecting the extraction and desorption efficiency, such as salt concentration, stirring rate, pH of sample solution, extraction time and temperature, temperature and time of desorption, were investigated. The intra- and inter-day relative standard deviations were in the range of 4.3–7.6%. The fiber-to-fiber reproducibility was 7.7–8.5%. The method showed a good linearity (r2> 0.9980) in the range of 0.02–20 μg L−1 with the detection limit of 0.005 μg L−1. The relative recoveries were also in the range of 94–97% for different water samples.

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