Application Preface

 Research Background

1. Importance of Food Safety  With the escalation of environmental pollution, the problem of heavy metal and harmful element contamination in crops has become increasingly prominent. As a representative leafy vegetable crop, spinach is more prone to absorbing and enriching heavy metals from soil and the atmosphere through its roots and leaves due to its large leaf surface area and short growth cycle.

2. Health Risks Toxic elements such as lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), arsenic (As), and thallium (Tl) can accumulate in the human body through the food chain, causing damage to multiple systems such as the nervous and renal systems. Standards such as the EU No 1881/2006 and China’s GB2762-2022 have set strict limits on elemental concentrations in vegetables.

3. Technical Needs Traditional atomic absorption spectrometry has issues such as low single-element detection efficiency and insufficient sensitivity. There is an urgent need to establish an efficient and accurate method for simultaneous multi-element detection.

 Article Conclusion

 1. In the analysis of spinach quality control sample GBW10015a, matrix effects were eliminated through internal standard and instrument parameter optimization. The excellent KED effect and application of electronic dilution ensured excellent trueness of impurity results for 19 elements, with 17 elements within the certified value range and the error of the other 2 elements within 10% of the median value.

2. This test demonstrates that the iQuad 2300 has strong matrix tolerance and quantification capabilities, enabling accurate and rapid quantification of elemental impurities and even major elements in green leafy vegetable samples.

Highlights of the Scheme

Nineteen elements were evaluated in this experiment. Seventeen elements fell within the certified value range, and the test results of the other two elements were within a 10% error range of the certified median values. Elements in trace to ultra-trace concentration ranges, and even the K element with percentage-level content, showed good trueness data. This fully meets the quality control requirements of food industry laboratories.

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