Miniaturized extraction, fast and sustainable chromatographic approach for determination of oxygen heterocyclic compounds in alcoholic beverages

In this research a miniaturized liquid-liquid extraction was developed for the determination of oxygen heterocyclic compounds in alcoholic beverages. Eight coumarins, twenty-one furocoumarins and seven polymethoxyflavones were identified and quantified, even at trace level, employing a fast and eco-friendly liquid chromatography, tandem mass spectrometry method, recently developed by our research group. Chromatographic separation was obtained in four minutes, using water and ethanol as mobile phases. LOQ values for all the analytes were in the ppb range. The miniaturized vortex-extraction developed was attained in about 12 minutes, employing only 1 mL of sample and of extractant. Furthermore, it allowed to extract more samples simultaneously. Extraction recovery was satisfactory with values ranging between 87 % and 96%. Moreover, the greenness of the proposed methodology was calculated employing the sample preparation method of sustainability metric, which allowed to weigh only the effect of the extraction techniques. Results, expressed in scores from 1-10, gave a value of 6.00, for the newly developed method against the 3.89 rated for a classic liquid-liquid extraction. All the sample analysed contained oxygen heterocyclic compounds in various concentrations with a minimum content of 38.8 mu g L-1 and a maximum concentration of 49361 mu g L-1.