RESEARCH PROFILES: ~(14)C analysis gets faster and easier

摘要

Accelerator MS (AMS) better watch its back because intracavity optogalvanic spectroscopy has now landed on its turf. Daniel Murnick and colleagues at Rutgers University describe the new technique, which can detect attomoles of ~(14)CO_(2) produced from submicrogram samples, in their recent AC paper (DOI 10.1021/ac800751y). The method has applications in areas such as monitoring of atmospheric CO_(2) and microdosing analyses in drug development. Normally, AMS is the technique of choice for measuring vanishingly small numbers of ~(14)C atoms in bioanalytical tracer studies. But its problems include its size (the instrumentation takes up a whole room), technical complexity, and cost. Also, because AMS requires elemental carbon for detection, carbon-containing molecules need to be quantitatively reduced before analysis.