Separation, concentration and determination of chloramphenicol in environment and food using an ionic liquid/salt aqueous two-phase flotation system coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography Original Research Article

Ionic liquid–salt aqueous two-phase flotation (ILATPF) is a novel, green, non-toxic and sensitive samples pretreatment technique. ILATPF coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was developed for the analysis of chloramphenicol, which combines ionic liquid aqueous two-phase system (ILATPS) based on imidazolium ionic liquid (1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride, [C4mim]Cl) and inorganic salt (K2HPO4) with solvent sublation. In ILATPF systems, phase behaviors of the ILATPF were studied for different types of ionic liquids and salts. The sublation efficiency of chloramphenicol in [C4mim]Cl–K2HPO4 ILATPF was influenced by the types of salts, concentration of K2HPO4 in aqueous solution, solution pH, nitrogen flow rate, sublation time and the amount of [C4mim]Cl. Under the optimum conditions, the average sublation efficiency is up to 98.5%. The mechanism of ILATPF contains two principal processes. One is the mechanism of IL–salt ILATPS formation, the other is solvent sublation. This method was practical when applied to the analysis of chloramphenicol in lake water, feed water, milk, and honey samples with the linear range of 0.5–500 ng mL−1. The method yielded limit of detection (LOD) of 0.1 ng mL−1 and limit of quantification (LOQ) of 0.3 ng mL−1. The recovery of CAP was 97.1–101.9% from aqueous samples of environmental and food samples by the proposed method. Compared with liquid–liquid extraction, solvent sublation and ionic liquid aqueous two-phase extraction, ILATPF can not only separate and concentrate chloramphenicol with high sublation efficiency, but also efficiently reduce the wastage of IL. This novel technique is much simpler and more environmentally friendly and is suggested to have important applications for the concentration and separation of other small biomolecules.