Recent developments of the speciation analysis methods for silver nanoparticles and silver ions based on atomic spectrometry

Abstract

Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) have been wildly used in agriculture, cosmetics, medicine, and food conservation fields due to their excellent antibacterial activity. The growing use of AgNPs products results that they can be inevitably released into the environment. Additionally, silver (Ag+) can easily find its way to the environmental waters from AgNPs. To gain deep insight into the transformation between AgNPs and Ag+ in the organisms or environment, and evaluate the toxicity of AgNPs and Ag+, various speciation analysis methods are developed. This paper presents a brief and systemic review for the speciation analysis of AgNPs and Ag+ based on the recently developed separation techniques coupled with atomic spectroscopy, including extraction method, chromatographic method, cation exchange reaction (CER) and single particles (SP) detection. Future perspectives in this field are also discussed.