Preparation and evaluation of a chitosan modified biochar as an efficient adsorbent for pipette tip-solid phase extraction of triazine herbicides from rice

The low allowable limit of triazine herbicides (THs) in rice makes it imperative to develop novel sample pretreatment methods for extraction and preconcentration of THs. Herein, a phosphoric acid activated biochar (PBC) was prepared and modified by chitosan (CS). For THs with different polarities, CS-PBC with multiple interaction sites exhibited satisfactory chemisorption. On this basis, a CS-PBC-based pipette tip-solid phase extraction (PT-SPE) was developed combined with HPLC to extract THs from rice. Low limits of detection (1.41–3.35 ng g−1), satisfactory linearity (0.01–2.00 μg g−1, R2 > 0.9974) and recoveries (96.13–116.25 %) were obtained with acceptable inter-day and intra-day precision (RSD ≤ 13.60 %). CS-PBC showed superior performance to three commercial single-mode adsorbents and comparable results to a hydrophilic-lipophilic balance adsorbent. The study explored the feasibility of PT-SPE for extracting THs from rice and broadened the application of plant biochar as an environmentally-friendly matrix in food sample pretreatment.