Ultrasound-assisted combined with nano-sized molecularly imprinted polymer for selective extraction and pre-concentration of amitriptyline in human plasma with gas chromatography-flame detection

•A simple and novel solvent-less was developed.•Selective extraction of amitriptyline using NMIP-ultrasound assisted was developed.•This method has been successfully applied in the analysis of human plasma.

A new process was developed for the selective extraction and pre-concentration of amitriptyline (AT) from human plasma using nano-sized molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) with ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE). The nano-sized AT imprinted polymer particles were synthesized using suspension polymerization in silicon oil and characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and scanning electron microscope (SEM) methods. With the application of optimized values, linearity values in the ranges of 20–200 μg mL−1 and 35–200 μg mL−1 were obtained for AT with the correlation of determination values (r2) 0.998 and 0.995 in water and plasma, respectively. The limits of detections (S/N = 3) for AT were found to be 0.7 and 1.2 μg mL−1 in water and plasma, respectively. The enrichment factors of AT in water and plasma were 52 and 40, respectively. The inter-day precisions (%) were in the range of 5.8–9.2%. Relative recovery rates ranged from 82.4% to 92.3%. The method was successfully applied to determine AT in the human plasma samples.