Spectrophotometric determination of furazolidone in real samples after its microextraction using hollow fiber reinforced with MIP@MWCNT

Furazolidone (FZD) is one of the nitrofuran antibiotics that was utilized as a feed additive for growth promotion and bacterial infection curing agent in animals and birds especially in hen and rooster [1]. But, due to its carcinogenicity and mutagenicity effects, its usage has been banned by European Union (Commission Regulation 1442/95) [2]. However, because of its low price and high effectiveness, it is still used illegally in some countries including Iran. Thus, developing a fast, simple, sensitive and reliable analytical method for monitoring the furazolidone residues in food, and biological matrixes is of great importance. Several analytical instrumental techniques such as chemiluminescence, spectrophotometry and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) have been reported for the determination of furazolidone [3]. However, its determination at low levels in complicated biological samples with high concentration of interfering matrix requires a sample preparation step for its separation and enrichment prior to its spectrophotometric measurement. Herein, hollow fiber reinforced with molecularly imprinted polymer supported on multiwalled carbon nanotube has been fabricated and used as the sorbent for microextraction and preconcentration of furazolidone from real samples. The fabricated sorbent has the advantages of rigidity, stability, high selectivity, low manufacturing cost as well as excellent mechanical properties. The sorbed furazolidone was eluted with 500 L of the mixture of hydrochloric acid and methanol (1:5 v/v) and quantified by fiber optic linear array spectrophotometry. The effect of some experimental parameters on the extraction of the analyte were studied and optimized. Under the optimized conditions, the calibration graph was linear (R2 = 0.9996) over the range of 10.0–100.0 μg L-1 with the detection limit of 2.6 μg L-1 for the preconcentration of 50 mL of the sample. The relative standard deviation (RSD %) at the 30.0 μg L-1 level of FZD (n = 6) was 3.7%. The developed method showed high selectivity toward the furazolidone and was successfully applied for the determination of trace amount of furazolidone in poultry tissues and water samples.