Electrospinning has emerged as the most versatile technique for nanofiber fabrication. Owing to their large surface area to volume ratio, electrospun nanofibers have the potential to serve as a good sorbent material for solid phase extraction (SPE) based techniques. The ability to incorporate a variety of functionalities prior or post-electrospinning presents a platform to tune the sorbents for specific applications. It is the aim of this contribution to highlight some of the recent developments that harness the great potential of electrospun nanofibers as sorbents for SPE. The review discusses the various ways in which the electrospinning technique addresses two important parameters for sorbent material, which are sorptive capacity and selectivity. It concludes by presenting and discussing the potential for development of SPE format technology and configurations based on electrospun nanofibers.

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A technique is described for performing solid phase extraction (SPE) at a semi-microscale. 10 mg of electrospun polystyrene fibers (average diameter 2.7 mm) were packed into a SPE barrel to form a disk (5 mm  1 mm). The device was employed to evaluate the extraction of four steroids: prednisone, hydrocortisone, cortisone acetate and 19-nortestosterone from water and plasma matrices. The analytes were desorbed from the fibers with 100 ml methanol and monitored by high performance liquid chromatography with a diode array detector (HPLC-DAD). The semi-micro SPE method provided extraction recoveries of 51.14-80.13% in plasma and 66.07-93.43% in water. The breakthrough volumes at 500 ng ml À1 ranged from 200-400 ml for all analytes. At optimal conditions, the four analytes followed an excellent linear relationship in the range 12.5-400 ng ml À1 with coefficients of determination (r 2 ) greater than 0.99 and the limits of detection ranged from 0.75 to 1.29 ng ml À1 . Due to its simplicity, it is anticipated that the method will greatly simplify disk solid phase extraction.