NAA and/or ICP-MS for the determination of trace elements in biological materials?

The IAEA Standard Reference Material, Mixed Human Diet, H-9, was analysed by all techniques and their performance and limitations evaluated under normal, routine, multi-element surveys of a large number of biological materials. This paper reports the result of this study. NAA cannot match the superior sensitivity for a wider range of elements obtained by ICP-MS. This has been verified for a wide range of food samples. While NAA is an inconvenient and time-consuming technique for many applications, it does not suffer from blank problems after irradiation of the sample, and becomes the preferred technique where low limits of detection are required for trace concentrations in solid samples. 8 refs