Optimization of a solid-phase extraction procedure in the fluorimetric determination of sulfonamides in milk using the second-order advantage of PARAFAC and D-optimal design

The objective of this work is to optimize a solid-phase extraction procedure for the simultaneous determination of sulfadiazine, sulfamerazine, and sulfamethazine in milk by fluorimetric detection. For this task, an alternative strategy is employed, which allows one to reduce noticeably the number of experiments without losing the quality of the estimations. It consists of the use of a D-optimal design together with PARAFAC decomposition for the calculation of the response in the experimental design. Effects of amount of cartridge sorbent, kind of milk, volume of conditioning solutions, kind of wash and elution, and kind of mixture of sulfonamides have been evaluated, for maximizing sulfonamide mean recovery and minimizing its standard deviation. Since milk without sulfonamides may give some matrix effect over the fluorescence signal, its behavior has also been studied. Optimal conditions have been selected where the ratio between sulfonamide recovery and milk without sulfonamides was the highest, which are 500 mg of cartridge sorbent, acid wash, and elution and 3 mL of conditioning solutions. The type of milk and mixture of sulfonamides not significant. This makes the procedure suitable for the combined determination of sulfadiazine, sulfamerazine, and sulfamethazine in any kind of milk. Finally, an experimental procedure is proposed, obtaining a sulfonamide mean recovery equal to 68.5% with values of standard deviation between 7 and 8 μg kg⁻¹.