Quantitative Evaluation of 28 Mineral Elements by Inductively Coupled Plasma/Mass Spectrometry and Its Application in Source Identification of Indian Opium

Abstract

An analytical method based on inductively coupled plasma/mass spectrometry (ICP/MS) was developed for the determination of 28 mineral elements (Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Ga, Sr, Cd, Ag, Ba, Pb, Bi Y, La, Ce, Nd, Pr, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er, Tm, Yb, and Lu) in Indian opium samples. The detection limits were found to be in the range of 0.0008–0.45 ng/mL. The recoveries of spiked samples for each element were found to be in the range of 83–106%, with a precision of less than 9%. A total of 124 opium samples from India were analyzed for the distribution pattern of the 28 mineral elements. Quantitative elemental data were subjected to chemometric analysis in order to determine an optimal classifier to evaluate the source of Indian opium. The study indicated that mineral elements might not be the suitable discriminators for the discrimination of licit opium-growing divisions of India. However, the methodology developed and the analytical data on elemental profile may find important forensic application in discriminating Indian opium with that of licit and illicit opium originating from different geographical regions of world.

Simple and efficient method for detection of traces of rare earth elements in minerals by raman spectroscopy instrumentation

“…The proposed method using Raman instrument is validated using some alternative modern analytical technique. The content of the REEs in the potential mineral sample should be determined either by: inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS) [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38], X-ray fluorescence (XRF) [39][40][41][42], neutron activation analysis (NAA) [43][44][45], ionchromatography (IC) [46][47][48], particle induced X-ray emission (PIXE) [49,50], scanningelectron microscopy/energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDX) [51] or synchrotron radiation [52] because the concentrations of REEs needed for the experiment are often below the limit of detection of conventional analytical techniques. In this work, a k 0 -method of instrumental neutron activation analysis (k 0 -INAA) was applied and the results for the REEs in the studied almandine and spessartine samples are given in Table 1 and Figure 3.…”

Trace element levels: How Substance Use Disorder (SUD) contributes to the alteration of urinary essential and toxic element levels

“…Substances can become contaminated with heavy metals through various pathways, such as adding heavy metals to increase weight and value, cross-contamination during processing, and uptake from substrate soils [16,17]. A high tendency for opium poppy and cannabis to accumulate toxic heavy metals, especially cadmium and lead, chromium, as well as semi-metal arsenic has been documented previously [16,[49][50][51][52][53][54][55].…”