Recent advances and trends in miniaturized sample preparation techniques

Abstract

Advances in the area of sample preparation are significant and have been growing significantly in recent years. This initial step of the analysis is essential and must be carried out properly, consisting of a complicated procedure with multiple stages. Consequently, it corresponds to a potential source of errors and will determine, at the end of the process, either a satisfactory result or a fail. One of the advances in this field includes the miniaturization of extraction techniques based on the conventional sample preparation procedures such as liquid‐liquid extraction and solid‐phase extraction. These modern techniques have gained prominence in the face of traditional methods since they minimize the consumption of organic solvents and the sample volume. As another feature, it is possible to reuse the sorbents, and its coupling to chromatographic systems might be automated. The review will emphasize the main techniques based on liquid‐phase microextraction, as well as those based upon the use of sorbents. The first group includes currently popular techniques such as single drop microextraction, hollow fiber liquid‐phase microextraction, and dispersive liquid‐liquid microextraction. In the second group, solid‐phase microextraction techniques such as in‐tube solid‐phase microextraction, stir bar sorptive extraction, dispersive solid‐phase extraction, dispersive micro solid‐phase microextraction, and microextraction by packed sorbent are highlighted. These approaches, in common, aim the determination of analytes at low concentrations in complex matrices. This article describes some characteristics, recent advances, and trends on miniaturized sample preparation techniques, as well as their current applications in food, environmental, and bioanalysis fields.

Volatilomics of Natural Products: Whispers from Nature

“…On another hand, although other coatings, such as PDMS, polyacrylate (PA), and Carbowax (CW), are also commercially available, their use in volatilomics is quite scarce due to the higher selectivity towards certain classes of polarities [58,59].…”

Trends in sample preparation and separation methods for the analysis of very polar and ionic compounds in environmental water and biota samples

“…The extraction of non-polar, polar, and even ionic species is possible via both hydrophobic and ionic interactions [ 35 ], e.g., for the analysis of polar sulfonylurea herbicides in environmental water samples [ 41 ]. Recent SPME approaches also focused on a lower ecological impact [ 42 , 43 ].…”

Covalent Organic Frameworks in Sample Preparation

“…For this reason, and despite the excellent extraction performance, simplicity and versatility shown by the already-mentioned conventional SPE, dSPE and m-dSPE, miniaturized sorbent-based techniques have emerged strongly in order to make the analytical procedures greener. In this sense, SPME constitutes without any doubt the perfect example of that, being one of the most extensively used sorbent-based extraction techniques, thanks to its simplicity, quickness and reduced volume of needed solvents which, in many cases, are absolutely unnecessary [ 94 ]. Since its introduction in 1990 [ 95 ], SPME has been subjected to a good number of modifications over the years leading to the introduction of different modalities, depending on analyte and sample characteristics.…”