Objective
The toxicity of metals, their environmental mobility and tendency to be accumulated in living systems are strictly correlated with their chemical forms, and then, usually, knowledge of the total concentration giveC only limited information about the potential risk (e.g. for human consumption). Chemical species can be present in the environment by direct introduction through natural or anthropogenic sources or by formation in the environment via chemical, physical and/or biological processes. Species of Hg, Sn and Se are of particular importance from an environmental point of view. The high toxicity of some of these species can cause environmental and economic damage such as that observed in the past in the Arcachon Bay in France (oysters poisoning by tributyltin ) and in Minamata Bay in Japan (fish poisoning by methylmercury caused several human victims). As a consequence of their adverse effect, a number of chemical species have been included in the list of substances to be monitored within the frame of EU legislation. The Council Decision: 75/437/EEC, 77/585/EEC, 81/420/EEC, 83/101/EEC, 84/132/EEC, 77/586/EEC and 80/68/EEC consideI also mercury, cadmium, tin, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, beryllium, vanadium, selenium, antimony and their compounds. The mention of a range of elements and their compounds implies that the laboratories should, in principle, determine a wide variety of chemical forms of elements for which the knowledge is still very scarce.
Nowadays, methods for the speciation of mercury, tin, and selenium are available and currently used.
However, many of these methods are far from being under control and environmental data are far from being comparable and reliable. Adherence to the legislation requires that the data produced are comparable from one laboratory to another, i.e. that the analytical results are of proven quality. The use of certified reference materials (CRMs) is an unvaluable tool to evaluate and to keep under control the performances of the analytical methods adopted. However, there are few CRMs for speciation analysis; moreover, these CRMs are certified for species of one element alone (e.g. organotins in sediments, methylmercury in tuna fish, Se IV and Se VI in synthetic water, etc.). Furthermore, no certified oyster material for chemical species are sc far available on the market. Laboratories, and in particular public laboratories devoted to legislative controls, are generally involved in analysis of many elements, and their species, in various matrices. In principle, to keep the methods under control, it would be necessary to make available a reference material for each element and its species for each matrix. This is quite impossible to achieve as the certification of each reference material takes a lot of time (ca 2-3 years), a lot of money (not only for the analyses but also for the collection and preparation of the material) and involves a lot of experienced laboratories.
One possible approach to this problem could be make available various matrices of environmental and social importance (e.g. sea food, sediments, soils, etc.) certified for as many elements and their species as possible as dictated by the state of art of existing methods for speciation analysis.
Several years of work in the frame of M&T Programme have concretised the possibility of certifying an oyster tissue matrix material for species of tin, mercury, and selenium species which will be a good tool for quality control of speciation analysis for environmental monitoring and food quality control purposes.
The objectives of the proposed programme are: to prepare an oyster reference material certified for tributyl-, dibutyl-, monobutyl-, triphenyl-, diphenyland monophenyl- tin, for methylmercury, for selenomethionine and selenocystine. The programme includes a feasibility study prior to the certification campaigns in order to assess the capacities of the participants, and to identify and eliminate shortcomings, and a certification study.
This programme will improve the quality of the speciation analyses which are important for environmental management and health care. The certified oyster tissue reference material which will become available will contribute to a higher standard of analytical capability in this field and thus to more reliable information from research and monitoring programmes.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrytransition metals
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistryalkaline earth metals
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrypost-transition metals
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrymetalloids
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
00060 Santa Maria di Galeria Roma
Italy