Preparation of surface molecularly‐imprinted magnetic kaolin for selective separation and determination of thiabendazole

Abstract

In this study, a selective sorbent was fabricated by combining a surface molecularly‐imprinted polymer and magnetic kaolin for reliable quantification of thiabendazole (TBZ) coupled with spectrofluorimetry. Several surface characterization methods were conducted to confirm the synthesis of TBZ‐imprinted magnetic kaolin with a polymer thickness of ~48 nm. The molecularly‐imprinted magnetic kaolin (MIP@MKLN) showed high adsorption capacity (8.7 mg/g), remarkable selectivity with an imprinting factor of 3.71 and excellent regeneration ability for up to 10 uses without significant change of its initial adsorption capacity for TBZ. The proposed method had linear range from 5 to 500 μg/mL TBZ concentration with a correlation coefficient of 0.995 and the limit of detection was 1.4 μg/mL. MIP@MKLN was used for selective separation and quantification of TBZ in orange and lemon samples. There were high recovery values ranging from 96.4% to 100.2% with lower relative standard deviations (less than 5%) in the spiked samples under optimized conditions. Overall, the proposed method based on MIP@MKLN as an excellent sorbent could produce a feasible, convenient, and promising method for rapid, selective, and sensitive quantification of TBZ in real samples.