fe 58 is a non-radioactive isotope of iron that is used in studies on the absorption, distribution, and metabolism of iron. This isotope has a very short half life and has been successfully used for a wide range of applications including metabolic tracer studies, anemia research, and energy expenditure research.
fe 58 has a half-life of about 4.5 years and is produced by alpha-particle exchange of iron from cobalt or nickel. It is a stable isotope with a mass isotope ratio of 58Fe/57Fe of 0.55, and is the most abundant of the three isotopes that are produced in alpha-particle exchange reactions.
The 58Fe/57Fe ratio is determined by spiking samples in a double spike solution containing the minor isotopes 57Fe and 58Fe, as well as 58Ni. Ni interference is not a factor in fractionation correction of unspiked d56Fe measurements, but it can have an effect on double spiked measurements if the signal of 58Ni exceeds 1% of the total signal.
Removing data points with d56Fe values outside of ideal peak flat ranges can improve precision of d56Fe ratios. Tolerance ellipses and Mahalanobis distances are effective outlier detection tools. We compared the D2s (68%) of IRMM-014 DS peak center masses to a 1s (68%) covariance ellipse and identified all data points with d56Fe values that plotted outside of the tolerance ellipse (Figure 4). Rejection of these outliers improved the d56Fe ratios by 0.056% (0-2s) per cycle for the d56Fe DS standard.