Quantification of trimesic acid in liver, spleen and urine by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to a photodiode-array detection

The quantification of trimesic acid, a constitutive organic linker from the biodegradable porous iron(III) trimesate MIL-100(Fe) (MIL stands for Materials from Institut Lavoisier), has been performed in different biological complex media (liver, spleen and urine) using a liquid–liquid extraction procedure. A recovery exceeding 92 wt% was achieved from rat tissues and urine spiked with trimesic acid. After extraction, the determination of the trimesic acid concentration was realised by using a simple and accurate high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method using photodiode-array detection (PDA) and aminosalicylic acid, as internal standard. Linearity of this method was kept from 0.01 to 100 mg of trimesic acid per liter of urine and from 0.05 to 5.00 wt% of trimesic acid per tissue weight. The limit of detection of the method was 0.01 μg per injection. This method was finally applied to analyze and quantify the amount of trimesic acid in rat urine and tissue samples at the different stages of degradation of MIL-100(Fe).