Water-compatible magnetic imprinted microspheres for rapid separation and determination of triazine herbicides in environmental water

• A kind of water compatible magnetic imprinted microspheres (WCMM) is synthesized.
• The WCMM adsorbent of dispersive solid-phase extraction can efficiently extract cyanazine and atrazine from environmental water.
• The application of dummy template effectively eliminates the problem of template leakage.

A novel kind of water-compatible magnetic imprinted cyromazine microsphere (WCMM) was synthesized by water/oil/water suspension polymerization. The obtained WCMM was homogenously spherical with porous morphology and strong magnetic properties. The microspheres were successfully used as adsorbent in dispersive solid-phase extraction (WCMM-dSPE) to selectively extract cyanazine and atrazine from environmental water. Good linearity of the two analytes was observed in the range from 2.5 to 200.0 ng mL−1. The average recoveries at three spiking levels ranged from 84.8% to 104.3% with relative standard deviations (RSD) less than 6.9%. Compared with magnetic non-imprinted particles (WCMN), the proposed WCMM adsorbent of dSPE efficiently improved the efficiency of extracting cyanazine and atrazine from environmental water samples and eliminated the effect of cyromazine leakage on the quantitative analysis of cyanazine and atrazine. The proposed WCMM-dSPE method combined the advantages of magnetic separation, molecular imprinted microspheres and dSPE.