Abstract
Recently, the massive progression of nanotechnology has led a large number of applications and consumer goods. Around 50% of nanotechnology-based consumer products were made of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), making them applicable to wound dressings, socks, and food containers due to the effective inhibition of growth in various microorganisms. Being applied for human use, however, the biokinetic and risk of AgNPs in mammal were rarely assessed, because there is still lack of an adequate analytical technique can provide dynamic information of AgNPs in mammal up to now. To in vivo monitoring of AgNPs in the extracellular fluids of rat liver, we developed an unsophisticated, automatic, and online hyphenated system comprising push-pull perfusion (PPP) sampling, the established in-tube solid phase extraction (SPE) procedure, and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) in this study. This system takes advantage of adsorbing AgNPs onto the inner wall of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) tubing which means AgNPs can be extracted from the complicated biological matrix. To optimize the analytical performance, the effect of sampling flow rate, sample loading flow rate, sample pH, tubing inner diameter and blood matrix were investigated. It has been demonstrated that under the optimized conditions, the detection limit of analyte AgNPs were found in the range of sub–□g/L. The accuracy of our proposed system was confirmed by analyzing biological samples spiking with defined amounts of AgNPs to demonstrate its validity. After the validation of this method, the applicability of our developed system was further demonstrated by in vivo monitoring the dynamic variation in the concentrations of AgNPs in the liver of anesthetized rats after intravenous dosing.