Single Particle Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (sp-ICPMS) for Nanoanalysis
Abstract:
Nanomaterials have become one of the most thriving areas for research and development in the academia and industry, proven by the exponential rise of number of research articles published over the last decades. It’s been used in a wide array of fields such as energy, environment, automobile, medicine, personal care, etc., owing to its special physico-chemical properties due to small size. But the increase of applications of nanomaterials also gave rise to a new health and environmental hazard, which is nanotoxicity. Nanomaterials have been linked to the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in plants, which is responsible for the damage of cell membrane, disruption of ATP production and DNA replication. It’s been also linked to the lung inflammation in rats. Given the scenario, the demand for new instrumental methods for the identification and quantification of nanomaterials in air, water, soil, and biological matrices is in rise.
Single Particle Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (sp-ICPMS) has become a promising tool for the identification and quantification of nanomaterials in practically all types of sample matrixes. It removes the lack of chemical selectivity of other competitive methods such as transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Dynamic light scattering (DLS) and inability to analyze samples in environmental and biologically relevant conditions. Despite being able to analyze nanoparticles in a one-by-one (single particle) manner, it suffers from some key limitations such as large ample consumption, low transport efficiency (9-10%), particles embedded in slid matrices, etc. Substrate assisted laser desorption (SALD) has been used with sp-ICPMS as sample introduction method instead of nebulizer to overcome these limitations. A frequency-quintupled Nd:YAG laser (213 nm) was used for laser ablation. Conditions such as laser fluence, laser beam scan rate and carrier gas flow rate were optimized using commercially available gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) of 56 nm and 86 nm. A transport efficiency of 61% was achieved for 56 nm AuNPs. The results were compared with the established method nebulizer sp-ICPMS. Use of SALD sp-ICPMS has enabled to reduce sample consumption, increase transport efficiency and better sensitivity.

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Suggested reading before the seminar: http://pubs.acs.org.ezproxy.uky.edu/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.analchem.5b02421