Flow-injection preconcentration of chloramphenicol using molecularly imprinted polymer for HPLC determination in environmental samples.

The residue of antibiotic chloramphenicol (CAP) is important issue for food quality control and also for the environmental monitoring. It is banned for use in food-producing animals and has very limited use in human medicine, because of its severe impact on human health. Determination of trace level of CAP in environmental samples requires a very sensitive analytical method and efficient preconcentration procedure. CAP can be efficiently preconcentrated in flow-injection system using flow-through reactor packed with molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP), but determination of CAP in eluate from MIP requires the application of chromatographic separation, which was made in reversed-phase HPLC system with UV detection. In optimized conditions the limit of detection for 100 mL sample in HPLC with offline preconcentration on MIP was evaluated as 0.66 mg/L. In hyphenated FIA-HPLC system with zone sampling the LOD for developed method was evaluated as 15 ng/L, which indicates the possibility of using it for analysis of environmental samples.