Highly efficient electrochemical determination of propylthiouracil in urine samples after selective electromembrane extraction by copper nanoparticles-decorated hollow fibers.

In this work, a novel, inexpensive and fast strategy was described for selective and effective extraction and determination of propylthiouracil (PTU) with a high polarity (log P = 1.2) based on electromembrane extraction (EME) followed by differential pulse voltammetry (DPV). For this purpose, copper nanoparticles (CuNPs)-decorated hollow fiber was used as the selective membrane for EME of PTU in urine samples. The influential parameters on extraction such as extraction solvent, pH, agitation speed, applied potential and extraction time were systematically investigated. In optimized conditions, acceptable linearity was attained between 0.05 and 5 µg mL (R value = 0.9994); moreover, superb enrichment factor (200) and repeatability (RSD%, n = 4, 5.7%) for 0.1 µg mL of PTU solution were in desirable range. In addition, extraction recovery of 80.0% was achieved in this condition and the limit of detection (S/N ratio of 3:1) was 0.02 µg mL. Finally, the proposed method was successfully applied to determine PTU concentration in urine samples.