Development of selective and chemically stable coating for stir bar sorptive extraction by molecularly imprinted technique

A novel stir bar coated with molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) as selective extraction phase for sorptive extraction of triazine herbicides was developed. The stir bar was prepared by chemically bonding the MIP to the glass bar to improve its stability. A homogeneous and porous structure was observed on the stir bar surface. Extraction performance shows that the MIP-coated stir bar has stronger affinity to the template molecule terbuthylazine as compared with that of the reference stir bar without addition of template. Owning to the shape and structural compatibility, the obtained stir bar also demonstrated specific selectivity to the structural related-compounds of nine triazines, and thus can be applied to simultaneous determination of these compounds from complex samples coupled with high performance liquid chromatography. Four complex samples with different matrix, including rice, apple, lettuce and soil were used to evaluate this proposed method. The limits of detection obtained are in the range of 0.04–0.12 μg L−1, and the recoveries for the spiked rice, apple, lettuce and soil samples were 80.8–107.7%, 80.6–107.8%, 72.0–109.8% and 89.0–114.8% with RSD from 1.2 to 7.9%, respectively. Moreover, this MIP-coated stir bar was firm, durable and can be prepared simply and reproducibly. The developed coating method would be useful to prepare a range of selective stir bars in order to extend the applicability of stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) in complex sample analysis.