Environmental Analysis by Colorimetry

摘要

Colorimetry is applied to detect a wide variety of analytes in the field in medical and environmental sciences.Colorimetry has great advantages in terms of simplicity and rapidity for practical analyses, which requires no large and expensive analytical instruments, e.g.atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), high performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometer (LCMS), induced coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS).The urinary glucose test strip is one of the oldest colorimetric systems developed by Free et al.in 1956.1 The glucose in urine was detected via the oxidation reaction of glucose coupled with the reduction of copper ion (the Benedict reaction).They developed the test strip further to detect glucose in urine based on the enzyme reactions of glucose oxidase and peroxidase.The urinary qualitative test strip is currently and practically used to detect glucose indeed.The sensitivity of the colorimetry is, however, relatively low compared to an instrumental analysis because the determination of color changes is performed by the naked eye.Thus, novel methods for pretreatments have recently been developed to detect environmental materials with a low concentration using the colorimetric technique.