dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction followed by ion mobility spectrometry for determination of antifungal drug: optimization using response surface methodology

Fluconazole is an antifungal drug, which is widely used in the treatment and prevention of manifold fungal infections. determination of fluconazole in the different real samples can be essential, particularly in environmental studies [1]. therefore a fast and sensitive analytical method can be very helpful. ion mobility spectrometry (ims) has almost all the features [2]. on the other hand, a fast and efficient microextraction method can obtain a lower detection limit and better cleanup in real samples. consequently, in this study, a dispersive liquid-phase microextraction, assisted by a homogenizer, combined with ion mobility spectrometry has been applied for the determination of fluconazole. figure 1 reveals the ion mobility spectrum of fluconazole. to find the optimization conditions and evaluate the proposed method, the response surface methodology (rsm) was employed. the optimum conditions were determined for the aqueous sample of 56 μl of dibromomethane and toluene with a volume ratio of 70:30 as the extraction solvent, sample solutions ph of 10, 9.5 w/v% of nacl for adjusting the ionic strength, dispersing rate of 16000 rpm, and the homogenizing time of 4 s. the analytical performances of the method for this analyte were also studied. the method was linear in the range of 5 to 100 μg/l. enrichment factor for the method was 545.7. the detection limit of the method was equivalent to 2.3 μg/l and the intra- and inter-day relative standard deviation were 4.3% and 4.5% respectively. the suggested method was investigated for the determination of fluconazole in real samples such as river water, and the relative recoveries for studied samples were obtained between 98 and 106%.