Solidified floating organic droplet microextraction coupled with HPLC for rapid determination of trans, trans muconic acid in benzene biomonitoring

Abstract Benzene is one of the carcinogenic compounds in the work environments. Exposure assessment of benzene through biological monitoring is an acceptable way to accurately measure the real exposure in order to conducting the health risk assessment, but it is always complicated, laborious, time consuming and costly process. A new sensitive, simple, fast and environmental friendly method was developed for the determination of urinary metabolite of benzene, trans trans muconic acid (t,t-MA) by dispersive liquid–liquid micro extraction based on solidification of floating organic droplet coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography with ultra violet detector. Central composite design methodology was utilized to evaluate the effective factors on the extraction output of the target metabolite. The calibration curve was plotted in the concentration ranges of 0.02–5 µg mL−1. The precision and accuracy of the method were assayed via the relative standard deviation (RSD%) and relative recovery (RR%) using spiked samples with three replications. The RR% and RSD% of the optimized method were 86.9–91.3% and 4.3–6.3% respectively. The limit of detection (LOD) of the method was 0.006 µg mL−1. The level of t,t-MA in real samples was ranged from 0.54 to 1.64 mg/g creatinine. We demonstrated that t,t-MA can be extracted and determined by an inexpensive, simple and fast method