Limitations of high performance liquid chromatography with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometric detection for speciation analysis of trace metals in biological samples
Résumé
Two current limitations of speciation analysis by HPLC-ICP MS: the difficulty to recover quantitatively intact metal species from solid samples and the difficulties with the identification of chromatographic signals are discussed. The illustrative experimental examples include investigation of solid-liquid extraction of metal-polysaccharide complexes from a food sample with customized mixtures of enzymes, detection, identification and investigation of the composition and stoichiometry of Cd, Zn - metallothionein complexes by HPLC-ICP MS and HPLC-electrospray (ESI) MS without and with post-column derivatization, and structural characterization and quantification of cobalt complexes with macrocyclic ligands by ESI MS and tandem ESI MS.