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Where is analysis of trace elements in biotic matrices going to?

über die zukünftige Entwicklung der Spurenelementanalyse in biotischen Matrices

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Summary

Accomplishing the act of balancing our technological progress with the accompanying risks for safety and health in our life quality, calls for modern analytical science. It should serve as an indicator for the correct balance of forces in the substantial sphere. However, today such an indicating role is based on rough estimations, or on insufficient or unconfirmed information with respect to concentrations, binding forms and local distributions of toxic or of essential substances within a sample. Moreover, many complex mechanisms of synergetic and antagonistic physiological interactions have not yet been clarified — and consequently, we have to take into account severe misjudgements of risks.

In addition, one has reached the limits of financial means required for the increasing control and survey tasks of daily analytical routine. Accordingly, only a long-term planned strategy for the development of more powerful, more reliable and more economic analytical methods, which moreover guarantee a better local distribution (microdistribution analysis), are the prerequisites for an improvement of this situation in analytical sciences.

In view of the future tasks and the ultimate limits of trace- and micro-distribution analysis of the elements, the present state and an outlook on reaching the limit of analysis are critically discussed. Main emphasis is placed here on the possibility of improving conventional determination methods such as AAS, OES, XRFA, MS, NAA with regard to better power of detection and reliability. But also innovative analytical principles such as laser atomic spectroscopy (RIS, LEI, LIF) are introducted. They promise to develop into an essential basis for micro and trace element analysis of tomorrow.

As instrumental methods are always the last step in an analytical procedure, a brief reference will be made to the problem of sample preparation, mainly with regard to the sources of systematic errors. As for trace analysis at the ng/ ml- or pg/ml-levels there are no reliable or certified standard reference materials available up to now, multistep procedures are still necessary. They must combine decomposition, preconcentration and determination methods in an optimal way to minimize systematic errors. The state-of-the-art of such multistep procedures in extreme elemental trace analysis will also be presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Spektrochemie und Angewandte Spektroskopie, Dortmund

    Günther Tölg

  2. Laboratorium für Reinststoffanalytik am Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung, Stuttgart Bunsen-Kirchhoff-Strasse 11, D-4600, Dortmund 1, Germany

    Günther Tölg

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Dedicated to Prof. Dr. W. Fresenius in gratitude on the occasion of his 75th birthday.

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Tölg, G. Where is analysis of trace elements in biotic matrices going to?. Z. Anal. Chem. 331, 226–235 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00481889

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