Development of a direct dilution method for the simultaneous determination of 40 metal and non-metallic elements in urine and blood samples within 6 min using ICP-MS: Application of comprehensive biomonitoring of elementomic phenotypes of individuals in paired biological samples.

The deficiency and overnutrition of both metal and non-metallic elements in human body can pose harmful effects to human health. Therefore, it is necessary to determination of elements in human body for assessing health risk of elementome. In this study, a simple and accurate biomonitoring approach was developed for quantifying 40 elements in biological samples within 6 min using a direct dilution method combined with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). It had good linearity (R ≥ 0.999) and high sensitivity (limit of detection (LOD) as low as 2 ng/L) with spiked recovery rates ranged between 82.53 % and 110.03 % for serum samples and between 81.92 % and 108.66 % for urine samples. The intra-day and inter-day precision are less than 15 %. In addition, uncertainty indicators and green analytical chemistry (GAC) approaches are used to evaluate the sources of uncertainty and greenness of developed analytical procedures. This method was finally used to detect the paired biofluids samples collected from 202 Chinese children. The distribution of element in this population through detection rate and level of body burden was analyzed. Furthermore, the function of paired serum and urine samples for detection of 40 elements is first explored by analyzing pairing samples. These results demonstrated that the proposed method for analysis of paired biological samples provides an alternative quantitative elementomics method to enable the comprehensive assessment of health risk associated with 40 elemental phenotypes of individuals.