Facile construction of magnetic core–shell covalent organic frameworks as efficient solid-phase extraction adsorbents for highly sensitive determination of sulfonamide residues against complex food sample matrices

Integration of advanced sample pretreatment techniques, with the involvement of functional nano/micro-materials as adsorbents, is of great importance and value for food-safety precise inspection. For now, the major demands for functional adsorbents are ease of fabrication, fast adsorption and separation performance, low toxicity, robustness, and reusability. In the present work, core–shell structured magnetic covalent organic frameworks (COFs) that employed Fe₃O₄ microspheres as the magnetic core and TpBD COFs as the adsorption shell have been successfully constructed as efficient solid phase extraction (SPE) adsorbents for complex food sample analysis. In favor of the combination of magnetic separation and effective preconcentration, the proposed magnetic COF-SPE method gave a rapid detection performance of the simultaneous detection of ten sulfonamide residues as well as high sensitivity, with detection limits in the range of 0.28–1.45 μg L⁻¹ under the optimized experimental conditions. The Fe₃O₄@TpBD core–shell adsorbents also demonstrated good stability, robust SPE preconcentration ability, excellent determination recovery, and good reusability. The applicability of the developed SPE method was well demonstrated by real sample analysis, with the recoveries ranging from 82–94%. Through this example, it was believed that the new emerging porous nano/micro-materials, like COFs, metal–organic networks, or hybrid structures, would play more and more important roles as functional materials in food-safety inspection, especially for highly efficient determination of targets against complicated food sample matrices.

Robust and efficient solid-phase extraction adsorbents based on magnetic core–shell covalent organic frameworks gave excellent analytical performance for determination of sulfonamide residues in food samples.