Microextractions in forensic toxicology: The potential role of ionic liquids

Abstract

In forensic toxicology, scientists are faced with complex samples and trace concentrations of low-dose legal and illegal drugs. To enable accurate and sensitive analysis, a thorough sample preparation step is crucial. In the context of green chemistry, sample preparation techniques are rapidly evolving.Microextractions are introduced to avoid the use of large solvent volumes and obtain high analyte enrichment. Another trend is the search for alternative solvents to replace toxic and volatile organic solvents. Ionic liquids (ILs) -liquid salts -are proposed as promising alternatives, thanks to their low volatility, low flammability, good thermal and chemical stability. Moreover, the IL structure can be altered by combining different cations and anions, resulting in ILs with optimized physicochemical properties for the extraction of a specific analyte. This review describes the current state of microextraction techniques that apply ILs for the extraction of forensically relevant drugs in biological samples.

Ionic liquids: prospects for nucleic acid handling and delivery

“…It has been established that dynamic micro- and nano-heterogeneous structuring observed in ILs can have a significant impact on the properties of IL-containing systems ( 14–16 , 33 , 34 ). This in turn enhances the tunability of such systems and suggests the possibility of even broader applications of ILs, including the fields of drug analysis and development ( 14 , 35–40 ), monitoring of chemical reactions ( 41 , 42 ), electron microscopy ( 42–44 ), fabrication of novel materials ( 45–49 ) and forensic toxicology ( 50 ). The flexibility of ILs is reflected almost at all levels of organization that can be found in a chemical substance.…”

Recent applications of microextraction sample preparation techniques in biological samples analysis

“…Microextraction by packed sorbent was first introduced byAbdel-Rehim (2004). MEPS can be defined as a small-scale variant of conventional SPE techniques and in this technique the sorbent is packed as a small plug inside a syringe(De Boeck et al, 2018). The sorbent cartridge is integrated into a syringe and can be used for 40-100 extractions depending on the sample matrix (Figure4;He & Concheiro-Guisan, 2019).…”