A novel calibration strategy based on background correction for quantitative circular dichroism spectroscopy.

When using circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy for quantitative analysis, the samples to be analyzed must be free of light-absorbing interferences. However, in real-world samples, the presence of background absorbers is practically unavoidable. The difference in the matrices between the real-world samples to be analyzed and the standard samples (on which either univariate or multivariate calibration model was built) would result in systematic errors in the quantification results of CD spectroscopy. In this contribution, a novel calibration strategy for quantitative CD spectroscopic analysis was proposed. The main idea of the proposed calibration strategy is to project the CD spectra of both the standard samples and the real-world sample to be analyzed onto a projection space orthogonal to the space spanned by the background CD spectrum of the real-world sample and then build a multivariate calibration model on the transformed CD spectra of the standard samples. The performance of the proposed calibration strategy was tested and compared with conventional univariate and multivariate calibration methods in the quantification of Pb in cosmetic samples using CD spectroscopy in combination with a G-quadruplex DNAzyme (e.g. PS2.M). Experiments results revealed that the proposed calibration strategy could mitigate the influence of the difference in the matrices between the standard samples and cosmetic samples and realized quantitative analysis of Pb in cosmetic samples, with precision and accuracy comparable to atomic absorption spectroscopy. The proposed calibration strategy has the features of simplicity and effectiveness, its combination with CD spectroscopic probes can realize accurate and precise quantification of analytes in complex samples using CD spectroscopy.