A review on applications of gold and silver-based sorbents in solid phase extraction and solid phase microextraction

Abstract

Organic and inorganic pollutants and contaminants are considered harmful to ecosystem, even at low or trace-level concentrations. Several studies have been performed to degrade or remove these contaminants from environmental matrices and the use of pre-concentration approaches such as solid phase extraction (SPE) and solid phase microextraction (SPME) for their quantitation has been developed and showed great demand as an essential module to upgrade both practical efficiency and analytical sensitivity. Gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) and silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) could be used as a sorbents prior to the combined high efficient separation or extraction methods with different detection techniques. Along with the rapid development of nanotechnology in material science, numerous nanomaterials include Au NPs and Ag NPs have been developed with particularly useful applications in analytical chemistry. Au NPs and Ag NPs are attracting a great deal of attention for their use in various technologies, including catalysis, optical and electronic devices, and separation science. In this review, recent progress of Ag NPs applied in SPE and SPME have been summarized and discussed. Au NPs and Ag NPs materials are evaluated for their unusual performance in various applications from environmental trace sample analysis to clinical investigations. Such great variety of uses makes nanomaterials kind of versatile tools in sample preparation for almost all categories of analytes.