Development of an in vitro test for screening of chelators of uranium

This work deals with an in vitro spectrophotometric method to evaluate the chelating ability of various organic ligands for uranyl ion. In this way, an uranium complex formed with a peculiar ligand is chosen as a reference. Any modification of the UV-Visible absorbance of the U(VI) reference complex, owing to its dissociation upon the addition of a new ligand, permits to compare the affinity of the latter ligand for U(VI) with that of the reference ligand. This test allows to screen easily a lot of ligands before to evaluate their in vivo uranium chelating property.