[Determination of inorganic elements in rat serum, and vegetable and fruit ferment liquid by ICP-MS]

In the present paper, the contents of thirteen inorganic elements in rat serum, and vegetable and fruit ferment liquid (VFFL) were measured by ICP-MS in order to study the anti-tumor effect of VFFL. Serum or VFFL was digested in nitric and perchloric acids at room temperature and then heated until dryness. The residue was dissolved with 1% (phi) nitric acid prior to ICP-MS analysis. The element contents were quantitated by using 45Sc, 103Rh and 187Re as the internal standards, respectively, according to the rule of close mass number. Certificate references bovine serum (GBW(E)090006) and tea (GBW070605) were employed to validate the proposed method, and the analysis results of most elements in two certificate references were in agreement with their reference values. The intra-day and inter-day precisions of the method in terms of relative standard deviation (RSD) were mainly below 10% and below 15%, respectively. The spiked recoveries for most of studied elements were 80%-110% in rat serum and 90%-120% in VFFL. This method was rapid, highly sensitive, and especially suitable to being applied to small quantity of biological samples with greatly different elements contents. Therefore, we measured the content of thirteen elements in the sera of rats, where in were induced liver cancer by revulsant, and the rate were fed with different dosage of VFFL in intragastric infusion at the same time. It was preliminarily found that the concentrations of some elements in sera of different experiment groups of rats were significantly different, implying the potential anti-tumor effects of VFFL.