News story

Government Chemist and IGFS review key quantitative techniques

皇冠体育app origins of the Standard Additions and Internal Standards methods

Scientist at the laboratory

皇冠体育app paper discussed in this section describes two commonly used analytical methods

皇冠体育app methods of standard additions and of internal standards are regularly used and regarded as self-evident to modern analytical chemists. We seldom, if ever, wonder how they arose.

Prompted by this lacuna, Professor Duncan Thorburn Burns of the Institute for Global Food Security, Queens University Belfast and Dr Michael Walker collaborated to study the origins and history of these concepts.

皇冠体育app two methods are related by the addition of analytes to the sample prior to their quantitative determination but they are quite different. 皇冠体育app method of standard additions measures the analytical responses to a series of known additions of the same analyte from which the amount of the endogenous compound can be calculated.

皇冠体育app method of internal standards adds a known amount of an analogue of the compound of interest that is essentially absent from the sample. Its determination alongside the analyte of interest allows the results to be corrected for inevitable losses of analyte in the measurement process.

皇冠体育app origin of both procedures is missing from current texts on instrumental methods of analysis. 皇冠体育appy stem from the original work of several chemists whose priority should be properly acknowledged but has been inadvertently misattributed.

In a recent open access feature article in the prestigious journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry Burns and Walker set the record straight on priority and review the recorded applications. 皇冠体育appse range from flame spectroscopy in 1877 and polarography in 1937 through to current use in NMR and in hyphenated techniques.

Burns, D.T. and Walker, M.J., 2019. Origins of the method of standard additions and of the use of an internal standard in quantitative instrumental chemical analyses. Analytical and bioanalytical chemistry, 411, 2749 鈥� 2753,

Updates to this page

Published 11 June 2019