MS maps actinides in exposed workers

摘要

To understand and quantify human exposure to radioactive elements, scientists have traditionally faced a conundrum: methods that would allow them to visualize radioactive distribution within tissue have not allowed them to simultaneously pinpoint the identities and concentrations of the elements involved. An autoradiograph shows a visual distribution of alpha particle decay but does not reveal the identity of the element causing it. Radiochemical methods identify and quantify elements by dissolving the sample, but this eliminates information about the distribution of the elements. In AC (DOI 10.1021/ac902650w), Philip Doble, Sergei Tolmachev, and colleagues report that they have used MS as a bio-imaging technique to simultaneously identify, visualize, and quantify long-lived actinides within tissue samples. The method applies laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-MS (LA-ICP-MS) to the analysis of radionuclides within slivers of tissue from lungs and lymph nodes of exposed workers. This technique "should be a nice complement to the more traditional autoradiographic techniques," says Raymond Guilmette of the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.