Abstract
With the growing requirements for the monitoring of heavy metals at an ultra-trace level in the environment and the real-time detection of toxic elements and their compounds for environmental pollution accidents, researchers devoted significant efforts to seeking atomic spectrometric methods that can be used for the simple, low cost, rapid, and field usable detection of targeted elements and their pollutants. Although conventional atomic spectrometric methods can easily realize the routine analysis of toxic elements in various samples in the laboratory, their bulky instruments and the complex sample matrix of environmental samples limit their further applications in field environmental analysis and complex sample analysis. Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is an environmentally-friendly sample pre-treatment technique, which can significantly simplify sample pretreatment, increase sensitivity, and reduce the interference from the sample matrix, thus being one of the most ideal sampling techniques for the detection of ultra-trace toxic elements and their compounds by atomic spectrometry (AS) with high sensitivity and good selectivity. During the past decades, significant developments of SPME-AS including novel coating nanomaterials, desorption mode, miniaturized spectrometer, and its use for field elemental analysis have been made to improve the analytical performance in the detection of toxic elements and their pollutants. Herein, we present a short review concerning recent advances in elemental analysis by SPME-AS. Particularly, we highlight their application in the field of environmental analysis based on combing SPME with the available microplasma-based atomic spectrometer. The conclusion section addresses the current challenges and gives an outlook on potential future trends in the field of elemental analysis and elemental speciation analysis.