Application of ionic liquids for elution of bioactive flavonoid glycosides from lime fruit by miniaturized matrix solid-phase dispersion

In this work, two flavonoid glycosides (neohesperidin and naringin) in lime fruit were effectively extracted by miniaturized matrix solid phase dispersion (MSPD), followed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet detection. The best results were obtained using Florisil (150 mg) as the sorbent and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (0.4 mL, 250 mM) as the elution solvent. This work represents the first attempt of using ionic liquids as a green eluent for extraction of the investigated compounds in miniaturized MSPD. Compared with the conventional methods, the proposed method is advantageous due to improved enrichment factor and reduced reagent consumption. A good linearity was observed with r2 values (>0.998). Meanwhile, the method gave acceptable recoveries (90.16-96.47%) for the determination of flavonoids in plant samples. The limits of detection of the two analytes ranged between 4.08 and 5.04 μg/g. The results showed that the optimized method has a great potential for sample preparation in routine analysis of complex plant samples.