Plenary Lecture

Modern Hyphenated Analytical Techniques for the Analysis of Environmental, Food and Biological Matrices

 
Associate Professor George A. Zachariadis
Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry
Department of Chemistry
Aristotle University
Panepistimioupoli, 54124 Thessaloniki, GREECE
E-mail: zacharia@chem.auth.gr

Abstract: Currently there is strong and urgent demand for accurate and sensitive analytical techniques, capable to measure traces of toxic substances in environmental and biological matrices. This demand comes as a result of the fast development of the countries all over the world and also of the technological globalization. The society becomes extremely sensitive in important issues affecting the safety and quality of human life and in response to this need, analytical chemistry is currently developing new powerful detection methods. This is a global trend and in all countries their state, research or academic laboratories are shift to be self-consistent in methodologies concerning the analysis of human environment.
For this purpose and because of the complexity of such samples, analytical chemistry offers today sophisticated techniques in order to estimate or determine the levels of many hazards and, among them, of toxic heavy metals. Modern hyphenated techniques combine a separation technique and a detector. The most commonly applied separation techniques are liquid and gas chromatography, as well as extraction to various solvents or materials. On the other hand, the most sensitive detectors are based on the mass spectrometric determination of chemical substances or the atomic spectrometric determination of elements through their spectral lines. Sophisticated softwares for optimization of the experimental procedure or interpretation of the results are developed for this purpose.
Elements like mercury, cadmium, lead, chromium, etc. are found in the environment and should be monitored in regular basis. It is well known that their high toxicity to living organisms depends on their species. In some cases the elemental state of these heavy metals is critical however in other cases their various organometallic species are more hazardous.
Accordingly, in this work, various examples showing the improved possibilities of the instrumentation of modern analytical techniques are presented and discussed.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr George Zachariadis is an Associate Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Macedonia, Greece. He teaches quantitative analytical chemistry and instrumental analysis to undergraduate and postgraduate students during the past fifteen years. He was the author or co-author of 6 books of Analytical Chemistry and of almost 75 scientific papers in the field of development, optimization and evaluation of modern instrumental analysis techniques. He has actively participated in almost 25 international conferences with more than 80 announcements. He is reviewer in 12 scientific journals of Analytical, Environmental and Food Chemistry. His main research activities are focused on Atomic and Mass Spectrometric techniques for the determination of heavy metals and trace elements of special interest, because inorganic substances even in very low concentrations play extremely important role in biological systems and also in the environment. He has also special research activities in Chemometric approaches for Archaeometric and Bioanalytical applications, as well as Food and Drug analysis, with almost a thousand of citations in his published work.