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Recent progress in the chemical attribution of chemical warfare agents and highly toxic organophosphorus pesticides

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper reviews the background of the development of chemical attribution technology, and discusses analytical and chemometrics technologies for chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and highly toxic organophosphorus pesticides. The analytical methods include gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS), liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS), infrared spectroscopy (IR), Raman spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), and other technologies. The chemometrics technologies include principal component analysis (PCA), hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), partial least squares–discriminant analysis (PLS–DA), random forest (RF), and other technologies. The combination of these analytical techniques can be used to detect a variety of CWAs and highly toxic organophosphorus pesticides.

Methods

All the reviewed information was collected through detailed searches on Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science using relevant keywords (such as chemical threat agents, chemical attribution and chemometrics).

Results

Most chemical attribution analyses of CWAs and highly toxic organophosphorus pesticides still rely on chromatography–mass spectrometry, such as GC–MS and LC–MS. Chemical attribution analysis involves sample composition analysis in addition to sample identification as well as sample traceability analysis. The analysis data involved is often relatively large, and thus chemometrics methods are required to adequately analyze the data. However, the analysis of mixtures of CWAs and related chemical substances remains challenging, and the analytical capabilities of the instrument need to be further improved. Although these technologies have high selectivity and application prospects, the analysis of real samples is still rare.

Conclusions

Although the chemical attribution technology for CWAs and related chemical substances has been developed to a certain extent, the development of real sample analytical methods has not been well established or verified. In the future, it is expected that more analytical methods that address sensitivity, specificity, stability, and repeatability will be developed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFC1602600).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of NBC Protection for Civilian, Beijing, 102205, China

    Xiaogang Lu, Zixuan Zhang, Runli Gao, Hongmei Wang & Junhua Xiao

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Lu, X., Zhang, Z., Gao, R. et al. Recent progress in the chemical attribution of chemical warfare agents and highly toxic organophosphorus pesticides. Forensic Toxicol 39, 334–349 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11419-021-00578-7

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