Preparation and testing of green solvents for reliable determination of nitrite in processed meat products:...

Nitrite is a highly toxic ion for human health. Despite some regulations on its use, it is still used illegally, especially in processed meat products. Therefore, new methods are being developed for the reliable and rapid determination of nitrite in processed meat products. In this study, the microextraction performance of various surfactants, ionic liquids, supramolecular solvents, and natural deep eutectic solvents was investigated for the quantitative microextraction of nitrite. An ultrasound assisted natural deep eutectic solvent-based dispersive liquid-phase microextraction method (UA-NADES-DLPME) optimized by central composite design was developed for the UV-Vis spectrophotometric determination of nitrite in various processed meat products. The method demonstrated satisfactory and comparable performance to other nitrite determination methods reported in the literature, owing to its superior validation parameters and environmentally friendly characteristics. The application of the UA-NADES-DLPME method under optimized conditions resulted in a wide working range (8-300 ng/mL), satisfactory coefficient of determination (R² = 0.9918), low limit of detection (LOD) (2.4 ng/mL), low limit of quantitation (LOQ) (8.0 ng/mL) and satisfactory relative standard deviations (RSD) (≤2.9 %) were obtained. The method exhibited a preconcentration factor of 130, with recovery values ranging from 94.3 % to 98.7 % for nitrite extraction. Following validation studies, the presented method was applied to various processed meat products and compared with the reference method.