Modern and Hyphenated Analytical Techniques for Metal Analysis of Environmental, Food, Pharmaceutical and Biological Matrices

摘要

Analytical chemistry offers today sophisticated techniques in order to estimate or accurately determine the levels of many hazards and, among them, of toxic heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, tin, chromium etc. Modern hyphenated techniques usually combine the capabilities of a separation technique with the power of a sensitive and selective detector. The most sensitive hyphenated detectors are based on the mass spectrometric determination of chemical substances or the atomic spectrometric determination of elements through their spectral lines. Heavy metals are found in the environment or in food or even in biological tissues in various forms (i.e. species) and should be monitored in regular basis. Based on the long-term experience of our laboratory in relative applications, various examples showing the improved possibilities of the instrumentation of modern analytical techniques are presented and discussed in this paper, in relation to the complexity of the sample matrices.