New strategies for extraction and clean-up of persistent organic pollutants from food and feed samples using selective pressurized liquid extraction

Pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) has gained wide acceptance for the extraction of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from various environmental and biological matrices. This extraction technique was developed to shorten the extraction step, since this is one of the most time-consuming steps in many analytical procedures. When POPs enter the food chain, as in a number of recent food crises, thousands of samples have to be analyzed in a short time to protect humans from severe POP exposure. In such cases, PLE provides a good alternative to conventional extraction techniques. This article gives an overview of a number of studies of the extraction of POPs from food and feed, using PLE. Of special interest are applications dealing with selective extraction procedures, where integrated clean-up strategies are utilized to combine extraction and clean-up or fractionation to simplify further the entire sample-preparation chain.