This document reports on a project concerning the development of Total Vaporization Solid Phase Microextraction to derivatize and analyze drugs in solid or liquid form without sample preparation, including tablets and plant material.
This report provides details about a research project on the development of Total Vaporization Solid Phase Microextraction (TV-SPME) in order to derivatize and analyze drugs in solid or liquid form without sample preparation. The project’s four specific goals were: design SPME methods to identify drugs in solid or powder form using a combination of solvent and derivatization, or altering so it becomes a derivative, agent; achieve the complete derivatization of the solvent and analysis of drugs in aqueous systems such as alcoholic beverages and urine; adapt TV-SPME to the analysis of cannabinoids in marijuana as well as synthetic cannabinoids; and optimize a representative method for each sample type that can be adapted by practicing forensic scientists. The two main research questions pursued by the project were: can TV-SPME be a viable replacement methodology for current protocols involving strong acids or bases or “dry” extractions using organic solvents? Are controlled substances volatile enough so that a simple headspace experiment can detect them? The researchers’ major accomplishments were: illustrating that headspace SPME can extract and identify a wide variety of controlled substances; demonstrating that on-fiber derivatization can allow for aqueous samples to be vaporized and derivatized. The main limitation of Headspace SPME was the volatility of the analytes, such as cannabinoids, which were more difficult to detect using this approach than most controlled substances.