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Current trends in materials and life sciences are flanked by the need to push detection limits to single molecules or single cells, enable the characterization of increasingly complex matrices or sophisticated nanostructures, speed up the time of analysis, reduce instrument complexity and costs, and improve the reliability of data. This requires suitable analytical tools such as spectroscopic, separation and imaging techniques, mass spectrometry, and hyphenated techniques as well as sensors and their adaptation to application-specific challenges in the environmental, food, consumer product, health sector, nanotechnology, and bioanalysis. Increasing concerns about health threatening known or emerging pollutants in drinking water, consumer products, and food and about the safety of nanomaterials led to a new awareness of the importance of analytical sciences. Another important driver in this direction is the increasing demand by legislation, particularly in view of the 17 sustainable development goals by the United Nations addressing clean energy, industry, and innovation, sustainable cities, clean water, and responsible consumption and production. In this respect, also the development of analytical methods that enable the characterization of material flows in production processes and support recycling concepts of precious raw materials becomes more and more relevant. In the future, this will provide the basis for greener production in the chemical industry utilizing recycled or sustainable starting materials.
This makes analytical chemistry an essential player in terms of the circular economy helping to increase the sustainability of production processes. In the life sciences sector, products based on proteins, such as therapeutic and diagnostic antibodies, increase in importance. These increasingly biotechnologically produced functional biomolecules pose a high level of complexity of matrix and structural features that can be met only by highly advanced methods for separation, characterization, and detection. In addition, metrological traceability and target definition are still significant challenges for the future, particularly in the life sciences.
However, innovative reference materials as required for the health and food sector and the characterization of advanced materials can only be developed when suitable analytical protocols are available. The so-called reproducibility crisis in sciences underlines the importance of improved measures of quality control for all kinds of measurements and material characterization. This calls for thorough method validation concepts, suitable reference materials, and regular interlaboratory comparisons of measurements as well as better training of scientists in analytical sciences.
The important contribution of analytical sciences to these developments is highlighted by a broad collection of research papers, trend articles, and critical reviews from these different application fields. Special emphasis is dedicated to often-overlooked quality assurance and reference materials.
The international research project HYCREF, funded by the European Commission in the 5 th Framework programme, aimed to develop methods to prepare homogenous and stable water-, soiland waste reference materials contaminated with mineral oil hydrocarbons and to test certify the mineral oil content by gas chromatographic methods. As mineral oil products are important sources for environmental contaminations a high need exists for certified reference materials for their determination using the new gas chromatographic methods (soil: ISO/FDIS 16703, waste: ENpr 14039, water: ISO 9377-2). The experimental conditions and results for preparation and characterisation of a total of nine reference materials (3 water-, 3 soil- and 3 waste materials) are described and discussed. Target values for the reference materials were defined at the beginning of the project in order to have clear quality criteria, which could be compared with the achieved results at the end of the project. These target specifications were related to the maximum uncertainty from test certification exercises (< 5 % for soil/waste and < 10 % for water), the maximum inhomogeneity between bottles (< 3 %) and minimum requirements for stability (> 5 years for soil/waste and > 2 years for water). The feasibility studies showed that solid materials (soil, waste) could be prepared sufficiently homogenous and stable. The test certified values of the 6 solid materials comprise a wide range of mineral oil content from about 200-9000 mg/kg with expanded uncertainties between 5.7-13.1 % using a coverage factor k (k = 2). The development of new water reference materials –the so-called “spiking pills” for an offshore- and a land-based discharge water represents one of the most innovative aspects of the project. The spiking pill technology facilitates the application and storage and improves the material stability compared with aqueous materials. Additional to the preparation and test certification of the reference materials investigations on the analytical method for the determination of mineral oil hydrocarbons were performed. The results obtained in relation to the optimisation of analytical method (extraction procedure, sample pretreatment, clean-up and measurement) were provided to the respective working group of ISO/TC 190, ISO/TC 147 and CEN/TC 292 and were incorporated into the ongoing standardisation procedures. The new version of ISO/FDIS 16703 (July 2004) includes the improvements based on HYCREF results, for example the increase of the solvent/sample ratio, the removal of acetone from the organic extracts and the use of column technique instead of batch technique for clean-up.