Adsorption and convenient ELISA detection of sulfamethazine in milk based on MOFs pretreatment

•High-efficiency detection method with simple and short-term pretreatment for SM2 in milk by MOFs.•The adsorption behavior and adsorption mechanism of three kinds of MOFs on SM2 in milk matrix.•The “zero influence” of milk matrix in immunological method was almost realized. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) has excellent adsorption performance, herein, three kinds of common MOFs were used for the adsorption of sulfamethazine (SM2) in milk, then enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (MOF-ELISA) was established. Firstly, NH2-UiO-66, NH2-MIL-101, and ZIF-8 were successfully prepared and their adsorption characteristics for SM2 were investigated. The kinetic models of the three MOFs were more in line with the pseudo-second-order adsorption kinetics, and the saturated adsorption capacity of NH2-UiO-66, NH2-MIL-101, and ZIF-8 for SM2 at 298 K were 139.64, 29.98, and 36.5 mg/g, respectively. Using three different MOFs as adsorbents, the pretreatment of milk samples could be completed within 1 h, the half inhibitory concentrations (IC50) of MOF-ELISA were 1.26, 1.86 and 2.74 ng/mL, the limit of detections (LOD) were 0.05, 0.12, and 0.19 ng/mL and the recovery rate were from 82.30% to 105.62% with the intra-day coefficient of variations (CVs) below 5.81% and inter-day CVs below 7.21%. Detection results showed good correlations with LC-MS/MS (R2 > 0.99), indicated that MOFs could effectively eliminate the interference of sample matrix, and has the potential to become a general pretreatment method for the detection of various matrices residues in food safety monitoring.