Towards greater mechanical, thermal and chemical stability in solid-phase microextraction

Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is a fast, solvent-free technique, which, since its introduction in the 1990s, has been increasingly applied to sample preparation in analytical chemistry. Conventional SPME fibers are fabricated by making a physical bond between the usual silica substrate and the polymeric coatings. However, some applications are limited, as the lifetime and the stability of conventional SPME fibers cannot meet the demands of analyzing relatively non-volatile compounds with more polar moieties. There have been attempts to analyze less volatile compounds by increasing the thermal, physical and chemical stability of the fibers. In this review, we present some new developments in the use of sol-gel technology, molecularly-imprinted polymers (MIPs) and electrochemical deposition to prepare thermally-stable, chemically-bonded, unbreakable SPME fibers. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.