Many of the recent advances in seawater trace metal analysis have employed solid phase extraction, either in batch mode (Lee et al., 2011) or via chelating columns (Milne et al., 2010 and Biller and Bruland, 2012), using several types of chelating resin. The column methods are amenable to flow-injection techniques (Lohan et al., 2005, Milne et al., 2010 and Biller and Bruland, 2012) which aid efficiency and reproducibility, particularly if they
Epigallocatechin are automated (Yang et al., 2009, Ho et al., 2010 and Hathorne et al., 2012) and incorporate on-line detection (Yang et al., 2009 and Hathorne et al., 2012). Appropriate and careful standardization is crucial to method accuracy and precision, and matrix matching can be a significant issue for achieving demonstrably excellent accuracy in methods that employ external standard calibration. Hence, some methods use isotope dilution standardization, which can provide excellent accuracy and reproducibility, and obviates matrix matching of external standards (Milne et al., 2010 and Lee et al., 2011). The demonstrated quality of long term precision is particularly important to the generation of large coherent data sets, and to the comparison of results among participating laboratories. The more recent published methods represent important advances, but require unremitting attention of a full-time expert operator (Lohan et al., 2005, Saito and Schneider, 2006, Milne et al., 2010 and Biller and Bruland, 2012), or alternatively have been applied only to a single
element or a limited range of elements (Yang et al., 2009, Lee et al., 2011 and Hathorne et al., 2012).
