Multi-walled carbon nanotube as a solid phase extraction adsorbent for analysis of indole-3-butyric acid and 1-naphthylacetic acid in plant samples

In this work, a new sample pretreatment method prior to HPLC separations was developed for the determination of auxins in plant samples. Owing to its large surface area and high adsorption capacity, multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) was chosen as the adsorbent for the extraction of auxins from plant samples. In this study, two important auxins were selected as model analytes, namely indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) and 1-naphthylacetic acid (NAA). They could be extracted and concentrated due to their π–π stacking interactions with MWCNT. Then HPLC-UV was introduced to detect IBA and NAA after sample pretreatment. Factors that may affect the enrichment efficiency were investigated and optimized. Comparative studies showed that MWCNT was superior to C18 for the extraction of the two analytes. Validation experiments showed that the optimized method had good linearity (0.9998 and 0.9960), high recovery (81.4%–85.4%), and low detection limits (0.0030 mg/L and 0.0012 mg/L). The results indicated that the novel method had advantages of convenience, good sensitivity, high efficiency, and it was feasible for the determination of auxins in plant samples.