ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY RESEARCH BASED ON THE USE OF LOW COST INSTRUMENTATION

Nowadays, the analytical needs of our societies increase constantly in fields like health and clinical analysis, food safety and the environmental pollution control. So, there is an increasing demand of suitable analytical methodologies to answer the main questions related to diagnostics and safety. In the aforementioned frame, analysts must try to develop accurate, selective and sensitive methodologies suitable to solve problems in a fast and environmentally friendly way to avoid time delays and environmental deleterious effects of the use of reagents and solvents. The so called Green Analytical Chemistry (1-4) has permitted to put the spot light on the need of sustainable methodologies to improve our analytical tools. It has involved: i) a drastic reduction of the analytical protocol steps, together with ii) the reduction of the power consumption, iii) reduction of reagents and solvents consume and iv) the replacement of toxic products by innocuous, or at least less dangerous ones. All that has been a prioritary task in the Analytical Chemistry of the XXI century and has permitted to reduce operator and environmental risks together with a reduction of costs of analysis. So, it is time to move from Green Analytical Chemistry to another challenge that I would like to call Democratic Analytical Chemistry.Democratic Analytical Chemistry means that analytical methods could be applied by using a reasonable cost instrumentation, suitable to be transported to the point of care and also to be managed by every citizen with a basic formation. In such a frame the advantages of the analytical methods could be extended from big hospital with high cost instrumentation to remote places with poor media and, additionally, many citizens around the world could be data producers suitable to alert the police makers about risks for the environment and the health of the people.In this keynote, I will present some of the research applications made in our laboratory. Studies concern the use of low cost and easy available tools. Extraction of analytes from samples was carried out by using a hard cap espresso machine of the Nespresso type, and direct determination of analytes, without any sample damage, was accomplished by IR methods or image processing, including smartphone images. Additionally, studies on the quality of air and human breath were made using portable gas sensors. In short, our studies evidenced that for the advancement of sciences a mixture of funds and imagination is required, being the last point the most important.