Electrospun nanostructured polystyrene as a new coating material for solid-phase microextraction: Application to separation of multipesticides from honey samples

• Polystyrene was used as nanostructure-coating on SPME fibers.
• Electrospinning of the polymer solution was used for fiber coating.
• Seven pesticides with different polarities were extracted to polystyrene-coated fiber.
• The resulted nanostructure coating was stable for frequent use.
• The prepared fiber was inexpensive with high capacity.

For the first time, electrospun polystyrene nanostructure was used as coating material on a stainless steel wire for solid-phase microextraction. Surface morphology of the coating was studied by scanning electron microscopy which showed the formation of nanofibers on the wire. The coating was stable after conditioning at 250 °C for 2 h. The efficiency of the polystyrene coating was approved by extracting a mixture of seven pesticides (polar and apolar) from head space of honey samples followed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. The important parameters affecting extraction efficiency such as, extraction time and temperature, desorption conditions, agitation rate and ionic strength were investigated. Under optimized experimental conditions, detection limits for the investigated pesticides ranged from 0.1–2 μg L−1. The intra- and inter-day precisions of the developed method were 3.5–17.6% and 10.0–25.0%, respectively. Finally, all the investigated pesticides were spiked to honey samples and extracted by the proposed method. The accuracies of determination of all the species were found to be in the range of 81–125%.