A dispersive solid-phase extraction method for the determination of Aristolochic acids in Houttuynia cordata based on MIL-101(Fe): An analytes-oriented adsorbent selection design

•MIL-101(Fe) was selected as a new sorbent for AA detection in Houttuynia cordata by an analytes-oriented considering.•The adsorption interactions between MIL-101(Fe) and AA-I & AA-II were studied.•Quantum chemical calculation and XPS spectrum were introduced into the adsorption mechanism investigation.•Quantification limits were lower than allowable limit stipulated by Chinese Pharmacopoeia. In view of the molecular structure of Aristolochic acid I (AA-I) and Aristolochic acid II (AA-II), MIL-101(Fe) was selected as the sorbent to develop a dispersive solid-phase extraction (d-SPE) method for capturing the two analytes from Houttuynia cordata. The interactions between the sorbent and analytes were investigated by FT-IR, XPS and UV–Vis DRS spectra. The optimized method demonstrated good linearity with R2 > 0.9999. The limit of detections (LODs) were 0.007 mg/L and 0.014 mg/L for AA-I and AA-II, respectively, lower than the limit stipulated by Chinese Pharmacopoeia (0.001 %, w/w). The recoveries for AA-I and AA-II were within the range of 73.3–106.4 %. The precisions of intra-day and inter-day were 0.9–5.8 % and 2.1–5.8 %, respectively. Thus, the established method demonstrated to be efficient and reliable to determine AA-I and AA-II in Houttuynia cordata.