What Does the Future Hold for High-Precision Metal Isotope Analysis?

The Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry featured numerous talks dedicated to plasma ion sources. Anika Retzmann, a postdoctoral researcher in the Atom Mass Laboratory at the University of Calgary, delivered such a presentation, and she sat down with Spectroscopy to discuss it and her team’s work more in detail.

Our interview series with Retzmann kicked off a discussion about how analyzing elemental and stable metal isotopic compositions of biological systems can answer challenging research questions in biomedicine and environmental science (2). Part II of our conversation concentrated on automation, and how data quality can be improved by automating purification procedures (3). Finally, the third part of the series focused on utility of multi-collector microwave inductively coupled atmospheric-pressure plasma mass spectrometry (MC-MICAP-MS) for isotopic analysis, which was the primary focus of her talk at the Winter Conference (4).

In the below video segment, we shifted our focus to the future, with Retzmann giving her thoughts about what emerging applications will benefit the most from high-precision metal isotope analysis of biological systems.

Spectroscopy: Looking ahead, which emerging applications or research questions do you think will most benefit from advances in high-precision metal isotope analysis of biological systems, and where do you see the field heading next?

Anika Retzmann: One interesting emerging application is the use of stable metal isotopes as a tracer and biomarker for diseases and biological systems. This is where I see a great potential that our field is going to, and we have been working in that area already for the last 15–20 years. Considering the advances that we are doing in isotopic analysis over the last couple of years, we are starting to get a better link and an improved understanding of what the isotopic shift means in relation to the process that we are looking at, like the dysregulations and diseases. There's a lot of improvement in that direction that I'm seeing ahead of us still coming, and it will help us to understand what the role of that metal is, what is its behavior, and how it is linked to a certain process. If I look ahead, the advances that I see coming up even more pronounced in the future, I'm thinking of in situ analysis, so combining the metal isotopic analysis with laser ablation to actually spatially resolve our isotopic signatures to get a better understanding on how the physiological processes and mechanism fractionate the element or the metal better state in a biological system.

And the second thing, which I think is going to approach in the future, more prominently as well, is the use of a compound-specific isotopic analysis of metals. So we are finding out how the isotope ratio changes in specific processes when metals and proteins are involved, and that will give us a unique insight.

This video clip is the final part of our conversation with Retzmann. 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 2026-01-20).
2. Wetzel, W. Analyzing Elemental and Stable Metal Isotopic Compositions of Biological Systems. Spectroscopy. Available at: https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/analyzing-elemental-and-stable-metal-isotopic-compositions-of-biological-systems (accessed 2026-01-20).
3. Wetzel, W. The Benefits of Using Automated Analyte Purification Procedures. Spectroscopy. Available at: https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/the-benefits-of-using-automated-analyte-purification-procedures (accessed 2026-01-20).
4. Wetzel, W. The Advantages MICAP-MC-MS Offers in Isotopic Analysis. Spectroscopy. Available at: https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/the-advantages-micap-mc-ms-offers-in-isotopic-analysis (accessed 2026-01-22).