Determination of Melamine in Fresh Milk with Hollow Fiber Liquid Phase Microextraction Based on Ion-Pair Mechanism Combined with High Performance Liquid Chromatography

In this work, a novel analytical method based on hollow fiber liquid phase microextraction (HF-LPME) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was developed for the analysis of melamine in fresh milk. The conditions of the HF-LPME were investigated and optimized. As a result, a supported liquid membrane containing 6-undecanone and di-2-ethylhexyl phosphoric acid (D2EHPA) was selected. The extractions were made from 25 mL aqueous donor phase (prepared from milk) with pH 5.0 to a more acidic acceptor phase (36 mu L 1 M HCl) and the mass transfer was driven by the proton gradient between these phases. Other optimum conditions of the HF-LPME were 60 min extraction time at 360 rpm stirring rate and an extraction factor of 21 times (extraction efficiency 3%) was obtained. The C8 column was operated at 1 mL/min at room temperature and the UV detection wavelength was 240 nm for HPLC. The mobile phase was 10 mM sodium n-octanesulfonate (pH 3.0) mixed with acetonitrile (85:15, v/v). The relative recovery of melamine for milk samples spiked with 0.5-25 mg/kg was in the range of 89.1-120.6% with the RSDs (n = 4) of 4.0-8.5%. It was found that the proposed method provided a linear range from 0.1 to 50 mg/kg (r(2) = 0.9993), method detection limit (MDL) of 0.003 mg/kg and method quantification limit (MQL) of 0.01 mg/kg. The obtained results demonstrated that HF-LPME combined with HPLC is a simple and cheap method for the determination of melamine in fresh milk.