REVIEW Recent advances in quantitative LA-ICP-MS analysis: challenges

Abstract Laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is a widely accepted method for direct sampling of solid materials for trace elemental analysis. The number of reported applications is high and the applica-tion range is broad; besides geochemistry, LA-ICP-MS is mostly used in environmental chemistry and the life sciences. This review focuses on the application of LA-ICP-MS for quantification of trace elements in environmental, biological, and medical samples. The fundamental problems of LA-ICP-MS, such as sample-dependent ablation behavior and elemen-tal fractionation, can be even more pronounced in environ-mental and life science applications as a result of the large variety of sample types and conditions. Besides variations in composition, the range of available sample states is highly diverse, including powders (e.g., soil samples, fly ash), hard tissues (e.g., bones, teeth), soft tissues (e.g., plants, tissue thin-cuts), or liquid samples (e.g., whole blood). Within this article, quantification approaches that have been proposed in the past are critically discussed and compared regarding the results obtained in the applications described. Although a large vari-ety of sample types is discussed within this article, the quan-tification approaches used are similar for many analytical questions and have only been adapted to the specific ques-tions. Nevertheless, none of them has proven to be a univer-sally applicable method