Inside the Laboratory: The Pergantis Laboratory at the University of Crete

At the Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, Spiros Pergantis, an analytical chemist and Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Crete, sat down with Spectroscopy to discuss his group’s current research endeavors (1–3).

Spectroscopy: What are the current research projects your laboratory is working on?

Spiros Pergantis: We've come here and presented on three areas. For several decades, we've been doing arsenic speciation, and now we've advanced to the point that we're looking not just at water soluble arsenic compounds, but also the lipophilic arsenic compounds, which in some fish types and marine samples, it can go up to 10 to 20% of arsenic. And these are the arsenal lipids.

We think we've made some really nice advancements there, combining both atomic spectrometric techniques like inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), which gives us total amounts of the arsenic species, the arsenal lipids. We've combined that with really sophisticated reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to separate all the arsenal lipids, and we've combined this with molecular mass spectrometry, high resolution, accurate mass orbitrap mass spectrometers, which can identify the Arsenal lipids based on their accurate mass. We can fragment them, and we are able to identify them. And we can do this both in a targeted and non-targeted approach. The two techniques, atomic and molecular mass spectrometry, come together, and they verify each other's results to give us a complete picture of what is happening in marine organisms in terms of their arsenal lipid content. These arsenal lipids, by the way, there have been some reports whereby some toxicity has been observed from these compounds, similar to what you would have with some of the inorganic arsenic. So, there is some concern. More analytical techniques and more accurate techniques need to be developed. We're very happy with this, and very soon a publication should be out on the topic we presented.

The second topic that we presented has to do with using ICP-MS as a carbon detector. This is something very new, even though several decades ago, it was shown that ICP-MS can be used as a carbon detector. It was used with chromatography, but it was used with size-exclusion chromatography (SEC), and that's because you can carry out size exclusion separations using an aqueous mobile phase. As soon as you start to add organics into the mobile phase, your background signal in the ICP-MS is just too high. We wanted to show that we could use the ICP-MS instrument to monitor detect carbon compounds in reverse phase HPLC, and we've demonstrated this using a polar-embedded C18 column. This allows for the running of 100% aqueous mobile phase without the collapsing of the C18 stationary phase. We showed some examples whereby we could separate and detect small amounts of methanol present in alcoholic beverages and spirits and quantitate the amount of the methanol that was present in these samples using the ICP-MS instrument. Even though it's a study that demonstrates proof of concept for the ICP-MS as a carbon detector after reverse phase HPLC, we feel that this might be opening up a new area of analysis whereby the ICP-MS can be used as a very sensitive and selective detector for reverse-phase separations of carbon compounds. If that's the case, then we'll have new applications in environmental and food analysis, and even some clinical applications. So, we're very happy with this development as well.

And the third project we reported on is a very challenging project that we've just started to play around with it, but it has to do with detecting nanoplastics, not microplastics, which can be done by ICP-MS in the single particle mode. Once you go below the micrometer diameter range, you end up with nanoplastics, and these are very difficult to detect because of the very small amount of carbon. Instead of trying to look at them in single particle mode, we have coupled our ICP-MS with hydrodynamic chromatography, which allows you to separate particles in the range of about 50 nanometers to about 1200 nanometers, using the ICP-MS to detect the eluting particles. We've done this, and it's worked with standard materials, but not yet with samples. This is something that we really look forward to doing in the future, but it is a challenging type of analysis.

This video clip is the second part of our conversation with Pergantis. To stay up to date on our coverage of the Winter Conference, click here.

References

1. IASA, Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry. IASA. Available at: https://iasa.world/winter-plasma-conference (accessed 2026-01-13).
2. University of Crete, Spiros Pergantis. University of Crete. Available at: https://www.chemistry.uoc.gr/wordpress/en/pergantis-spiros/ (accessed 2026-01-13).
3. Wetzel, W. The Strength of the Spectroscopy Community. Spectroscopy. Available at: https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/the-strength-of-the-spectroscopy-community (accessed 2026-01-19).