Ultrasound-assisted extraction followed by disposable pipette purification for the determination of polychlorinated biphenyls in small-size biological tissue samples

The use of solid-phase extraction pipette tip (also called disposable pipette extraction, DPX) has been evaluated for the purification of environmentally relevant polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in fatty extracts obtained by ultrasound-assisted extraction with a sonication probe from small-size biological tissues. Complete sample treatment involved only 50 mg of sample and was completed in ca. 15 min with minimal sample manipulation and reagents consumption (i.e., 1.5 mL of n-hexane and 0.8 g of acidic silica). The performance of the proposed methodology for the intended determination was firstly evaluated by determination of the endogenous PCB levels in a naturally contaminated internal reference material. The determined concentrations showed a good agreement with those obtained using a more conventional sample preparation procedure previously validated in our laboratory (recoveries, as compared to levels determined using the latter method, were in the 85–123% range for a large majority of the studied congeners, and the relative standard deviations were in general lower than 14%). Results obtained for the analysis of reference food samples and certified reference materials NIST 1945 and 1947 demonstrated that, when combined with gas chromatography coupled to ion trap mass spectrometry working in the tandem mode, GC–ITD(MS/MS), the proposed methodology allowed accurate determination of most of the investigated PCBs and that 50 mg of sample sufficed for the screening of less abundant toxic congeners.