Efficient extraction based on a polydimethylsiloxane/bimetallic ZnCo-MOF carbonization sponge coupled with GC-MS for the rapid analysis of volatile compounds in cuminElectronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/d3ay01889j

A novel porous polydimethylsiloxane/bimetallic ZnCo-MOF carbonization (PDMS/ZnCo-MOF@C) sponge was successfully fabricated, followed by its utilization in GC-MS for the high efficiency extraction and determination of volatile compounds in cumin. The PDMS/ZnCo-MOF@C sponge exhibits outstanding properties with a considerable adsorption capacity, high surface area, and large pore volume and has shown potential as an ideal adsorbent for the separation and preconcentration of trace volatile compounds. The effect of different parameters on the extraction efficiency were investigated. Excellent analytical performances were achieved for the representative compounds (β-pinene, p-cymene, γ-terpinene, cuminaldehyde, and linalyl acetate), including wide linearity (2.31–440.1 ng) with high correlation coefficients (R2≥ 0.9979), low LODs (1.02–3.11 ng) and LOQs (2.45–7.08 ng), and satisfactory precision (intra-day RSDs ≤ 2.89% and inter-day RSDs ≤ 4.14%). The optimal method was applied for the analysis of cumin from different regions and 44 volatile compounds were identified. The correlation between the different regions of cumin and volatile compounds was explored using multivariate statistical analysis. These results demonstrated that PDMS/ZnCo-MOF@C is an efficient, simple and sensitive material for use in the pretreatment technique for the determination of the volatile compounds in aromatic plants.