Abstract: Reaching trace amounts of mycotoxin contamination requires sensitive and selective analytical tools for their determination. Improving the selectivity of sample pre-treatment steps covering new and modern extraction techniques is one way to achieve it. Molecularly imprinted polymers as selective sorbent for extraction undoubtedly meet these criteria. The presented work is focused on the hyphenation of on-line molecularly imprinted solid-phase extraction with a chromatography system using a column-switching approach. Making a critical comparison with a simultaneously developed off-line extraction procedure, evaluation of pros and cons of each method, and determining the reliability of both methods on a real sample analysis were carried out. Both high-performance liquid chromatography methods, the one using off-line extraction on molecularly imprinted polymer and the on-line column-switching approach, were validated, and the validation results were compared against each other. Although automation leads to significant time savings, fewer human errors and no required handling of toxic solvents, it reached worse detection limits (15 vs. 6 μg/L), worse recovery values (68.3-123.5 vs. 81.2-109.9%) and worse efficiency throughout the entire clean-up process in comparison with the off-line extraction method. The difficulties encountered, the compromises made during the optimization of on-line coupling and their critical evaluation are presented in detail. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
Author keywords: column-switching chromatography, Molecularly imprinted polymers, mycotoxin, On-Line Solid-Phase Extraction, Patulin