The use of electrothermal vaporizer coupled to the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for the determination of arsenic, selenium and transition metals in biological samples treated with formic acid

Abstract

A fast method for the determination of As, Co, Cu, Fe, Mn, Ni, Se and V in biological samples by ETV-ICP-MS, after a simple sample treatment with formic acid, is proposed. Approximately 75mg of each sample is mixed with 5mL of formic acid, kept at 90°C for 1h and then diluted with nitric acid aqueous solution to a 5% (v/v) formic acid and 1% (v/v) nitric acid final concentrations. A palladium solution was used as a chemical modifier. The instrumental conditions, such as carrier gas flow rate, RF power, pyrolysis and vaporization temperatures and argon internal flow rate during vaporization were optimized. The formic acid causes a slight decrease of the analytes signal intensities, but does not increase the signal of the mainly polyatomic ions ( 14N 35Cl +, 14N 12C +, 40Ar 12C +, 13C 37Cl +, 40Ar 36Ar +, 40Ar 35Cl +, 35Cl 16O +, 40Ar 18O +) that affect the analytes signals. The effect of charge transfer reactions, that could increase the ionization efficiency of some elements with high ionization potentials was not observed due to the elimination of most of the organic compounds during the pyrolysis step. External calibration with aqueous standard solutions containing 5% (v/v) formic acid allows the simultaneous determination of all analytes with high accuracy. The detection limits in the samples were between 0.01 (Co) and 850μgkg -1 (Fe and Se) and the precision expressed by the relative standard deviations (RSD) were between 0.1% (Mn) and 10% (Ni). Accuracy was validated by the analysis of four certified reference biological materials of animal tissues (lobster hepatopancreas, dogfish muscle, oyster tissue and bovine liver). The recommended procedure avoids plasma instability, carbon deposit on the cones and does not require sample digestion. © 2011 Elsevier B.V..