Recent advances in dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction for pesticide analysis

•Dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) for analysis of pesticides.•A comparison of DLLME systems for pesticide analysis on a scientific basis.•Milestones, green aspects, advantages and drawbacks of DLLME protocols.•Classifications of DLLME protocols and their applications to analysis of pesticides.•The outlook on applications of DLLME coupled to various instruments.

Dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) techniques have attracted considerable interest because they are cost effective, easy to operate, and reliably preconcentrate trace levels of analytes in complex matrices. This comprehensive review is concerned with principles, applications and developments of DLLME techniques for analysis of trace emerging pesticides in water. DLLME techniques have had few couplings to spectrofluorimetric methods and relatively none with electrochemical techniques. We highly recommend thin-layer stripping voltammetric techniques at surface-modified electrodes and spectrofluorimetric techniques coupled and implemented with DLLME. Great attention should be focused on developing low-cost, precise methods for analysis of trace concentrations of pesticides in various biological and environmental samples. We describe milestones and the combination of nanotechniques in the DLLME field, green aspects, advantages and shortcomings of known DLLME protocols.