This question cannot be answered in general. First, it highly depends on the dye you are trying to degrade. Second, degradation products can be of a similar or a much higher polarity of the dye. The latter may not be extracted into the ether layer and hence lost. Often a strong acid should be added before you extract your products to protonate any carboxylic acids.

Hi Malini,

of course this always depends on your compound but I would suggest that you can use your ether layer directly. Therefore you just have to be really precise with the amount of organic solvents. But if you take always the same amount of your ether layer you are saving one step and GC/MS should be sensitive enough.

I would also suggest that you take different organic solvent, just to improve the extraction step (CHCl3, hexane, MTBE, EtOAc, ...).

We are performing our extractions in such a way:

1) add the organic solvent to the water layer, 2) shaking, 3) centrifuge, 4) take and transfer the organic layer to the corresponding GC-Vial.

Greets

Anja

The efficacy of the extraction process is dependent on the solubility of the products obtained from the degradation of the dye. So. it's better if you try other solvents like chloroform etc. Also, in my opinion take the HPLC grade solvents for extraction and then use the extract obtained directly for GC-MS analysis. Good luck.

Thank you all .I will try as per the suggestions given.

What type of compound is the dye?

A lot of dye compounds are not volatile, thus HPLC is preffered. A UV/DAD detection will give you very low detection limits.

The dye is ionic or non-ionic compound? What is the pKa? (maybe you need to play with pH of water layer to obtain effective extraction).

regards,

G