Chemical fingerprinting techniques used

Konig, I. and Hollatz, R. (1990) A fingerprint technique using Mossbauer spectroscopy for the determination of individual chemical iron species in young sediments. Hypeifine Interact., 57, 2245. 

The emerging analytical technique of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a simple atomic emission spectroscopy technique that has the potential for real-time man-portable chemical analysis in the field. Because LIBS is simultaneously sensitive to all elements, a single laser shot can be used to record the broadband emission spectra, which provides a chemical fingerprint of a material. 

Many applications which use Ge(Li) spectra of irradiated samples for identification purposes as a type of "chemical fingerprint have recently appeared in the literature. The potential of this technique in the fields of forensics, archeology, and detection of art forgeries is just beginning to be explored. 

It is apparent that these "fingerprint techniques relating particle sizes as well as concentration data to source components need further refining. However, it should be possible eventually to identify the origin of airborne particles provided suflBcient chemical data become available. Recently, lead isotopic ratios have been used to estimate the contribution of blood lead levels originating from gasoline combustion. Perhaps this approach can be further refined to better characterize the sources of other airborne metals. 

A third application for fractionation procedures is their use as characterization or fingerprint techniques to monitor the effect of some other chemical or biological treatment. In this regard gel permeation chromatography has been particularly useful. 

In yeasts particularly, chemotaxonomy by means of application of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy was described by Gofin and Spencer(2), and the acetolysis fingerprinting technique by Kocourek and Ballou(3) can be also used to determine the taxonomy of yeasts. These methods are based on the differences in the chemical structure of their mannan components. Similarly, serological clasification of yeasts by the use of slide agglutinin test was reported by Tsuchiya, Fukazawa and Kawakita(4). 

The search for faster screening methods capable of characterizing propolis samples of different geographic origins and composition has lead to the use of direct insertion mass sp>ectrometric fingerprinting techniques (ESf-MS and EASI-MS), which has proven to be a fast and robust method for propoHs characterization (Sawaya et al., 2011), although this analytical approach can only detect compoimds that ionize under the experimental conditions. Similarly, Fourier transform infrared vibrational spectroscopy (FITR) has also demonstrated to be valuable to chemically characterize complex matrices such as propolis (Wu et al, 2008). 

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