The Role of Nanoanalytics in the Development of Organic-Inorganic Nanohybrids—Seeing Nanomaterials as They Are

The functional properties of organic-inorganic (O-I) hybrids can be easily tuned by combining system components and parameters, making this class of novel nanomaterials a crucial element in various application fields. Unfortunately, the manufacturing of organic-inorganic nanohybrids still suffers from mechanical instability and insufficient synthesis reproducibility. The control of the composition and structure of nanosurfaces themselves is a specific analytical challenge and plays an important role in the future reproducibility of hybrid nanomaterials surface properties and response. Therefore, appropriate and sufficient analytical methodologies and technical guidance for control of their synthesis, characterization and standardization of the final product quality at the nanoscale level should be established. In this review, we summarize and compare the analytical merit of the modern analytical methods, viz. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), RAMAN spectroscopy, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and several mass spectrometry (MS)-based techniques, that is, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), single particle ICP-MS (sp-ICP-MS), laser ablation coupled ICP-MS (LA-ICP-MS), time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS), liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) utilized for characterization of O-I nanohybrids. Special attention is given to laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry (LDI-MS) as a reliable nanoanalytical platform for characterization of O-I hybrid nanomaterials, their quality, design verification and validation.