Dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction followed by high-performance liquid chromatography for determination of benzoate and sorbate in yogurt drinks and method optimization by central composite design.

A new method based on dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) followed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for determination of benzoate and sorbate salts in yogurt drinks was developed. The effective parameters in DLLME process, including volume of extraction and disperser solvents, pH and salt effect, were optimized using response surface methodology (RSM) based on central composite design. The yogurt drink samples were extracted using NaOH and Carrez solutions (potassium hexaferrocyanide and zinc acetate) were used for sedimentation of proteins. For DLLME, a mixture of extraction solvent (1-octanol) and disperser solvent (ethanol) was rapidly injected into the sample solution by syringe and cloudy solution is formed. Subsequently, the upper 1-octanol layer was analyzed by HPLC. The detection limits for benzoate and sorbate were 0.06 ng mL(-1) and 0.15 ng mL(-1), respectively. The relative standard deviations (RSD) for seven analyses were 4.96% for benzoate and 4.58% for sorbate. The proposed method demonstrated good linearity and high enrichment factor. A clean separation and good chromatogram is readily achieved without the presence of matrix interference. A comparison of this method with previous methods demonstrated that the proposed method is an accurate, rapid and reliable sample-pretreatment method that gives very good enrichment factors and detection limits for extracting and determining sorbate and benzoate in yogurt drink samples.