Facile fabrication of naphthalene-functionalized magnetic nanoparticles for efficient extraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from environmental water and fish samples.

In this study, naphthalene-modified magnetic nanoparticles (FeO@Nap) were simply prepared based on specific chelation interaction between phosphate groups and metal ions on FeO surface. The resultant FeO@Nap were characterized by FTIR, BET, SEM, TEM, NAM, TGA, and VSM techniques. With FeO@Nap as adsorbent, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were efficiently extracted by magnetic solid-phase extraction (MSPE) from environmental water and fish samples through the π-π interaction between modified naphthalene groups and PAHs, followed by their determination by GC-MS/MS. The key parameters influencing the extraction efficiency were investigated. Under the optimized conditions, the FeO@Nap-based MSPE/GC-MS/MS method proposed in this paper was evaluated and applied for analyzing PAHs in environmental water and fish samples. And the proposed MSPE/GC-MS/MS method exhibited good linearities for water samples (in the range of 0.1-10 ng/mL, R >0.9945) and for fish samples (in the range of 1-100 ng/g, R > 0.9905). The limits of detection (LODs) for water and fish samples were 0.004-0.031 ng/mL and 0.07-0.28 ng/g, respectively. Additionally, this method exhibited desirable accuracy and precision. The PAH recovery values from water and fish samples ranged from 81.5% to 109.6% with inter- and intra-day relative standard deviations (RSDs) of less than 12.8%. The MSPE/GC-MS/MS method was successfully applied to the analysis of real environmental water and fish samples. Overall, the newly synthesized FeO@Nap exhibited high sensitivity, specificity, reusability, repeatability, and it could efficiently extract PAHs from environmental water and fish samples by MSPE.