Simple Fabrication of Solid-Phase Microextraction with Surface-Coated Aluminum Foil for Enhanced Detection of Analytes in Biological and Clinical Samples by Mass Spectrometry

Rapid detection of analytes in biological and clinical samples is highly desirable, and significant progress has been made with direct mass spectrometric (MS) analysis. Rapid and sensitive detection, however, remains a major challenge in direct analysis of raw samples. In this study, we described a simple, rapid, and efficient method for enhanced detection of analytes in complex samples, using surface-coated aluminum (Al) foil that was simply made with conductive resin for physical adhesion of functional particles. The surface-coated Al foils were used as a solid-phase microextraction (SPME) tip for rapid sampling of target analytes from raw samples and then applied as an electrospray ionization (ESI) tip to couple MS for sensitive detection. Our results show that surface-coated Al foil is highly effective for enhanced detection of analytes in complex samples with excellent analytical performances, including sensitivity, reproducibility, and linear ranges. Overall, this development enabled an extremely simplified protocol to integrate SPME and ESI that is expected to have a significant impact on rapid screening of raw samples.