Special Issues-11-01-2016

The nutritional value of food depends on many components, including vitamins and minerals. While both of these occur naturally, they are also commonly added during processing to increase the nutritional content. Naturally occurring nutrients enter plants (and ultimately animals who consume plants) from the soils in which they grow, so it is equally important to monitor the nutrient content of both soil and final food products. Since the number of elemental nutrients is limited and they are present at relatively high concentrations, ICP-OES is an ideal technique for their measurement in soil and food. This work will focus on the elemental nutrient analysis of soils and two categories of food products: milk and fruit juice, whose nutritional content is particularly important as they are commonly consumed by young children.

Strict and steady food control protects consumers against undesired contaminations and guarantees a high level of quality. This can be achieved by enforcing maximum allowable concentrations of hazardous substances. For simultaneous quantitative determination of the inorganic elements in wine, the ICP-MS technique is the preferred quality control tool. ICP-MS offers high sensitivity (trace detection), a wide dynamic range and a high sample throughput. In this study, commercially available red and white wines were investigated; 14 different elements were quantified simultaneously: arsenic, cadmium, caesium, copper, chromium, vanadium, iron, manganese, nickel, lead, selenium, tin, thallium and zinc. The developed ICP-MS method has a high accuracy, regardless of element concentration.

Despite all of the recent advances in analytical technologies dedicated to biotherapeutics, accurate protein quantification remains a challenge for the biopharmaceutical industry. UV spectrophotometry is commonly used for batch testing, but it requires the knowledge of the extinction coefficient of the protein, whose experimental determination requires the accurate concentration of a reference standard obtained by an absolute quantification method. To address the need for a fast analytical method capable of accurately quantifying a protein without any specific reference substance, an isotope dilution ICP-MS method was developed and validated, based on sulfur determination, allowing very accurate determination of a single protein in solution after microwave digestion.

Click the title above to open the Spectroscopy November 2016 Applications of ICP & ICP-MS Supplement, Vol 31 No s11, in an interactive PDF format.