A rapid and sensitive method for the determination of dibutyl phthalate in wine by flow-injection chemiluminescence analysis

• DBP in wine determined by lumniol–Mb CL system for first time.
• DBP quenches the CL intensity of lumniol–Mb system.
• The CL intensity decrements are logarithmic over DBP concentrations.
• The determination of DBP at picogram levels by FI–CL proposed for first time.
• FI–CL method is simple, fast and sensitive for detecting DBP in wine.

A sensitive method for the determination of picogram level dibutyl phthalate (DBP) in wine by flow-injection chemiluminescence (FI–CL) analysis is presented for the first time, which was based on the quenching effect of DBP on the luminol–myoglobin (Mb) CL system. The decrement of CL intensity was linearly proportional to the logarithm of DBP concentration in the range of 0.1–100 pg mL−1 with the detection limit of 0.03 pg mL−1 (3σ). At a flow rate of 2.0 mL min−1, a complete determination of DBP including sampling and washing could be accomplished in 0.5 min, giving the maximum sample throughput of 120 h−1. The proposed method was successfully applied to the determination of DBP in wine, human serum and urine samples with the relative standard deviations (RSDs) of less than 3.0% (n = 5). The molecule docking results showed that DBP interacted with the amino acid residues near the heme moiety of Mb. The possible CL mechanism of luminol–Mb–DBP reaction should be that the binding of Mb with DBP forming a 1:1 complex (binding constant K = 1.55 × 104 L mol−1) led to the conformational change of Mb and resulted in the quenching of CL intensity.