Urea-based porous organic polymer/graphene oxide hybrid as a new sorbent for highly efficient extraction of bovine serum albumin prior to its spectrophotometric determination.

A 3D urea-based porous organic polymer (Urea-POP) was prepared via the reaction of tetrakis(4-aminophenyl)methane and 1,4-Phenylene diisocyanate. The polymer was subsequently reacted with 2D layered nanosheets of graphene oxide (GO) to prepare Urea-POP/GO as a novel and highly efficient sorbent for pre-concentration and extraction of serum albumin samples, prior to spectrophotometric determination. The hybrid material combines advantages of both POP and GO such as hydrophilicity, high dispersion stability, porosity, and having a large number of nitrogen- and oxygen-containing functional groups. Parameters which influence the extraction efficiency such as the amount of the adsorbent, pH of sample solution, ionic strength, adsorption and desorption time were investigated and optimized. For the method, detection limit of 0.068 mg L-1 and determination coefficient (R2) of 0.9991 were obtained. The intra- and inter-day was calculated with five replicates in the same day and seven consecutive days, respectively. Intra-day and inter-day precisions were 1.7% and 5.9%, respectively. The maximum sorption capacity was 357.1 mg g-1, which is higher than the other reported sorbents. The proposed method was demonstrated to be sensitive enough for determination of serum albumin from bio-samples.