Improved in-tube electro-membrane extraction followed by high-performance liquid chromatography for simple and selective determination of ionic compounds: Optimization by central composite design.

In this work, an efficient sample clean-up method, named in-tube electro-membrane extraction, is modified to resolve the formation of bubbles in the extraction process. This modified method is applied for the extraction of two model analytes including tartrazine and sunset yellow from food samples. The method is based on the electro-kinetic migration of ionized compounds by the application of an electrical potential difference, and on this basis the analytes under investigation, as anionic compounds, simply migrate from the donor phase and concentrate in the acceptor phase. A thin polypropylene sheet placed in the tube acts as a support for the membrane solvent, and it separates 30 μL of the aqueous acceptor from 1.2 mL of the aqueous donor. This setup can be used to solve the problem of extracting highly hydrophilic analytes. Response surface methodology is used for optimization of the experimental parameters so that under the optimized conditions, the method provides a good linearity in the range of 50-1000 ng/mL, low limits of detection (15-25 ng/mL), good extraction repeatabilities (relative standard deviations below 8.1%, n = 5), and high extraction recoveries (54-76%).