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Determination of total cathinones with a single molecularly imprinted fluorescent sensor assisted by electromembrane microextraction

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Abstract

An electromembrane microextraction (EME)-assisted fluorescent molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) sensing method is presented for detecting the total cathinone drugs in urine samples. In this detection system, the clean-up ability of EME eliminated the matrix effects on both target binding with MIPs and the luminescence of the fluorophore in the sensor. Moreover, by optimizing the extraction conditions of EME, different cathinone drugs with a same concentration show a same response on the single aggregation induced emission (AIE) based MIP (AIE-MIP) sensor (λex = 360 nm, λem = 467 nm). The recoveries were 57.9% for cathinone (CAT) and 78.2% for methcathinone (MCAT). The EME-assisted “light-up” AIE-MIP sensing method displayed excellent performance with a linear range of 2.0–12.0 μmol L−1 and a linear determination coefficient (R2) of 0.99. The limit of detection (LOD) value for EME-assisted “light-up” AIE-MIP sensing method was 0.3 μmol L−1. The relative standard deviation (RSD) values for the detection were found to be within the range 2.0–12.0%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that determination of total illicit drugs with a single fluorescent MIP sensor was achieved and also the first utilization of sample preparation to tune the sensing signal of the sensor to be reported. We believe that this versatile combination of fluorescent MIP sensor and sample preparation can be used as a common protocol for sensing the total amount of a group of analytes in various fields.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant numbers 81801875 and 21874050).

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  1. Rong Hu and Yibo Yan contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Environment Health (Incubation), Key Laboratory of Environment and Health, Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Environment and Health (Wuhan), Ministry of Environmental Protection, School of Public Health, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, #13 Hangkong Road, Wuhan, 430030, China

    Rong Hu, Long Jiang & Xiantao Shen

  2. Department of Forensic Medicine, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, #13 Hangkong Road, Wuhan, 430030, China

    Yibo Yan & Chuixiu Huang

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  1. Rong Hu
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Hu, R., Yan, Y., Jiang, L. et al. Determination of total cathinones with a single molecularly imprinted fluorescent sensor assisted by electromembrane microextraction. Microchim Acta 189, 324 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-022-05405-3

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