Sustainable pretreatment of blood samples using hydrophobic eutectic solvents to improve the detection of bisphenol A

abstract

Bisphenols, and mostly bisphenol A (BPA), are widely used in many consumer products. Due to its toxicity, BPA presents a noteworthy risk to the environment and human health. Despite these concerns, monitoring BPA proves challenging, particularly in highly complex matrices such as blood, because extraction and clean-up require multiple steps, the use of volatile organic solvents, and associated high costs. To overcome these limitations, this work discloses a novel, one-step and sustainable pretreatment technique of blood samples using hydrophobic eutectic solvents (HES). Systems composed of different HES, including thymol : menthol, benzyl alcohol : cyclohexanol, and decanoic acid : trioctylphosphine oxide at various mole ratios, combined with potassium citrate buffer aqueous solutions at different volume ratios, were carefully evaluated as three-phase partitioning (TPP) systems. The high performance of the HES-based systems for the pretreatment of blood samples was confirmed with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis, with a BPA recovery of (98 +/- 3)% in the HES-rich phase, and with the interfering biological material precipitating at the liquid-liquid interphase. The green nature of the developed method was assessed using the Analytical GREENess Metric (AGREE) and the AGREE metrics of environmental impact of sample preparation (AGREEprep), scoring 0.59 and 0.63, respectively. The high pretreatment performance offered by HES-based TPP systems with respect to blood samples, combined with their greener credentials, paves the way for their application in a variety of biomonitoring studies.

subject category

Chemistry; Science & Technology - Other Topics

authors

Polesca, C; Passos, H; Sousa, ACA; Tue, NM; Coutinho, JAP; Kunisue, T; Freire, MG

Groups

G4 - Renewable Materials and Circular Economy
G5 - Biomimetic, Biological and Living Materials

Projects

CICECO - Aveiro Institute of Materials (UIDB/50011/2020)

CICECO - Aveiro Institute of Materials (UIDP/50011/2020)

Associated Laboratory CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials (LA/P/0006/2020)

Collaboratory for Emerging Technologies, CoLab (EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES)

acknowledgements

This work was developed within the scope of the project CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials, UIDB/50011/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/50011/2020), UIDP/50011/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDP/50011/2020) & LA/P/0006/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0006/2020), financed by national funds through the FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC). C. Polesca acknowledges FCT - Fundac & atilde;o para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia for the PhD grant with the reference UI/BD/151282/2021 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UI/BD/151282/2021). This work was supported by national funds through FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC): LSRE-LCM, UIDB/50020/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/50020/2020), UIDP/50020/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDP/50020/2020),and ALiCE, LA/P/0045/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0045/2020). This work was also supported by national funds through CHRC, UIDP/04923/2020. Further financial support was provided by the Leading Academia in Marine and Environment Pollution Research (LaMer) project, a Joint Usage/Research Center project funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT).