enews_WP3.jpg06 May 2010
DEVELOPING DETECTION METHODS FOR HEAVY METALS
Recently there has been a lot of focus on inorganic arsenic in foodstuffs with relation to food safety, emphasized by two recent opinions from EFSA (October 2009) and JECFA (March 2010). In both cases inorganic arsenic is focused upon as the most toxic arsenic species and more specific data on inorganic arsenic in foodstuffs are called upon. In CONffIDENCE WP3 one of the objectives is the development of a method for the selective determination of inorganic arsenic based on solid phase extraction (SPE) for separation followed by determination by HG-AAS. The method principle is illustrated on the right.

The developed method is currently being validated in-house at DTU Food and will later be subjected to a collaborative trial involving several European laboratories. The Table below shows selected results compared with results obtained using the reference method based on HPLC-ICPMS (data from DTU Food) and shows good agreement. During the in-house validation study more sample types will be evaluated as well as method performance characteristics. The results from the validation study are expected later this year.
 

SPE-HGAAS (mg/kg)

HPLC-ICPMS (mg/kg)
CRM TORT-2 (lobster hepatopancreas)(Lobster hepatopancreas)

0,94

0,95

Blue mussel

0,38

0,37

Shrimp

0,22

0,20
 
Information supplied by Jens J. Sloth, Food DTU, DK and Matti Karp, TUT, Fi, Cluster 3 representatives
Source : CONffIDENCE