Ionic liquid-based electromembrane extraction and its comparison with traditional organic solvent based electromembrane extraction for the determination of strychnine and brucine in human urine

• Ionic liquid based electromembrane extraction (IL-EME) was first established.
• The extraction performance of IL-EME compared with ENB based EME was carried.
• The simultaneous extraction for multiple samples was achieved by parallel extraction setup.
• The method was applied to the determination of strychnine and brucine in human urine samples.

An ionic liquid-based electromembrane extraction (IL-EME) method was presented, and its performance was compared with 2-ethylnitrobenzene (ENB) based EME for the determination of strychnine and brucine in human urine. For the two methods, the fundamental extraction parameters such as supported liquid membrane, voltage, extraction time, pH values of sample solution and acceptor solution, temperature and salting-out effect were separately optimized. IL-EME provided 96- and 122-fold enrichment factors for strychnine and brucine, respectively, which were better than those obtained in EME (83- and 86-fold, respectively). The calibration curves were linear over the ranges of 20–720 μg L−1 for strychnine and 20–640 μg L−1 for brucine with the correlation coefficients higher than 0.9950. The repeatability of EME and IL-EME were evaluated by five parallel experiments giving the relative standard deviations of 5.12–6.98%. As the results indicated, compared with ENB based EME, the proposed IL-EME is more reliable and could provide better extraction performance for the determination of strychnine and brucine in human urine.