Gold comes at a small price compared to platinum and palladium. And the main target of the palladium and platinum quest is not their use in jewelry. These precious and extremely rare metals are crucial in the automobile, chemical and pharmaceutical industries, being unmatched as catalysts in various chemical reactions. Palladium is employed for car catalytic converters that make eliminated gases less toxic.

But finding and exploring the scarce sources means expensive instruments maneuvered by highly trained chemists and more than this, it takes days to get the results.

Now, a team at the University of Pittsburgh led by Kazunori Koide, a chemistry professor in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences, has developed a rapid, easy and cheaper method that could ease the discovery of palladium/platinum deposits and could boost the industrial production of drugs and other items.

The new method is based on a colorless fluorescein-based solution (like that employed to detect blood traces at crime scenes during investigation) that, due to the action of ultraviolet light produced by a hand-held lamp, shines green in contact with the tiniest levels of palladium and platinum, which usually are found together.

"The process takes approximately one hour as opposed to the effective but complex and days-long analysis currently employed in the mining and pharmaceutical industries. Moreover, the Pitt team's method can accommodate hundreds of samples at once whereas current technology analyzes samples only one at a time. Our method can be used on the mining site. And you don't need a doctorate in chemistry-anyone can do this." said Koide.

"A major pharmaceutical company is currently evaluating the method in detecting trace amounts of palladium in drug samples," he added.

Palladium is crucial in the synthesis of many drugs, but even residual amounts of this metal are toxic for the human organism; that's why chemical analysis of the drugs to detect this metal is necessary. Shortening this to just one hour will enable manufacturers to develop more drugs.

In the mining industry, the new method could be very efficient in the discovery of viable amounts, especially as so far palladium/platinum deposits have been encountered just in a few countries (like US and Canada), suggesting an instability of the supply, the reason for their huge prices.