Low-temperature precipitation for the determination of residual organotin compounds in plant oil using dispersive-solid phase extraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry

Considerable numbers of organotin compounds, which are widely used in people's lives, have serious toxic effects to human health. In this paper, a simple, low-cost method for the simultaneous determination of four organotins in plant oil samples by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) has been established for the first time. The method uses dispersive-solid phase extraction (d-SPE) clean-up after a low-temperature precipitation procedure, in situ derivatization with NaBEt4 and liquid-liquid extraction (LLE). The relevant experimental variables influencing the whole results were optimized; a good accuracy and precision were attained under the optimal conditions. The average recoveries obtained for analytes were in the range of 75.6-114.9% with a relative standard deviation (RSD) of 3.9-12.6%, and the limits of detection for each organotin ranged between 0.19 and 0.33 mu g kg(-1). Finally, these four organotins in different oil samples were detected using this method, which demonstrated the feasibility of our developed method in this study.