Lincomycin, a natural antibiotic, is widely used by animal and fishery husbandries to prevent infections and treat diseases. It endangers people’s health when they eat foods containing lincomycin residue, especially the frequent consumption of milk and chicken products containing lincomycin. Hence, it is extremely important to evaluate the content of lincomycin in food samples. However, a direct analysis of lincomycin in milk and chicken is quite difficult because of its very low concentration level and the presence of undesirable matrix effects. Therefore, selective and efficient extraction of lincomycin from complex food samples prior to its quantification is required.
In this study, lincomycin-imprinted silica nanoparticles were prepared according to boronate affinity-based template-immobilized surface imprinting. Silica nanoparticles and boronic acid ligands 3-fluoro-4-formylphenylboronic acid were used as supporting materials and functional monomers, respectively. The prepared lincomycin-imprinted silica nanoparticles exhibited several significant results, such as good specificity, high binding capacity (19.45 mg/g), fast kinetics (6 min), and low binding pH (pH 5.0) toward lincomycin. The reproducibility of lincomycin-imprinted silica nanoparticles was satisfactory. The lincomycin-imprinted silica nanoparticles could still be reused after seven adsorption–desorption cycles, which indicated high chemical stability. In addition, the recoveries of the proposed method for lincomycin at three spiked levels of analysis in milk and chicken were 93.3–103.3% and 90.0–100.0%, respectively.
The prepared lincomycin-imprinted silica nanoparticles are feasible for the recognition of target lincomycin with low concentrations in real food samples such as milk and chicken. Our approach makes sample pre-preparation simple, fast, selective, and efficient.