| Antibiotics pollution in the environment has drawn much attention recently by both scientific and regulatory communities, mainly due to their intrinsic pharmaceutically activity, spread in environment and maintenance of bacterial resistance. To study their environmental behavior in the ecosystem and assess their potential risks, it is essential to quantitatively determine their occurrence in different environmental matrices. Because of the matrix complexity and trace levels of antibiotics, pretreatment of environmental samples to quantification is critical. In this paper, we reviewed various pretreatment methods including liquid-liquid extraction, solid-phase extraction, automated online solid phase extraction, solid phase micro-extraction, stir-bar sorptive extraction, supercritical fluid extraction, accelerated solvent extraction, microwave assisted extraction, matrix solid phase dispersion and immunoaffinity chromatography. Their basic principles, application, advantages and disadvantages for pretreating antibiotics in liquid, solid and biological samples were summarized and discussed. Future development directions on antibiotics extraction and purification were proposed. |
