Alkyl imidazolium ionic liquid based sweeping-micellar electrokinetic chromatography for simultaneous determination of seven tea catechins in human plasma

• Emphasize the role of long chain ionic liquid in enhancing the sensitivity of CE.
• Sweeping-MEKC making up to 183-fold sensitivity enhancement.
• Investigation of simple and fast CE method for the analysis of catechins.
• Reliable application to determine unchanged catechins in human plasma.

Determination of tea catechins in human plasma might provide a means of better evaluation of their benefits. The main difficulty in their analysis is the low catechins concentrations in plasma and their susceptible to oxidation during sample pretreatment. In the current work, a sweeping-micellar electrokinetic chromatography (sweeping-MEKC) by long alkyl chain ionic liquid was investigated for the simultaneous determination of seven principal naturally-occurring tea catechins in human plasma under acidic conditions after the intake of green tea beverage. The effects of type and concentration of three 1-tetradecyl-3-methylimidazolium ionic liquids, namely bromide, acetate and hydrogen sulfate salts were studied. The seven catechins were successfully separated within 5 min by micellar running buffer of 5 mmol L−1 1-tetradecyl-3-methylimidazolium bromide and 15 mmol L−1 phosphate buffer at pH 4.5 under optimal parameters of 50 mbar injection for 150 s, 10 kV, 25 °C and 200 nm. To prevent the possibility of IL adsorption, an appropriate rinsing protocol was established. The method has analytical ranges from 0.5, 1, 0.5, 1, 2, 1 and 1 to 500 ng mL−1 for GC, C, EC, EGCG, GCG, ECG and EGC, respectively (r ranged from 0.995 to 0.999). The intraday precision and accuracy were 0.1–0.9% RSD (n = 10) and 97–106% recovery, respectively. Limits of detections of analytes were ranged from 0.2 to 1.2 ng mL−1. The current sweeping-MEKC achieved sensitivity enhancement factor (SEF) up to 183-fold of analytes concentrations compared to other hitherto published CE reports that is suitable to find out the trace amounts of catechins in plasma.