Arsenic And Mercury Speciation Analysis In Seafood By High-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry

There are many kinds of microelements contained in seafoods that are vital to human health.The toxicity and bioavailability of microelement depend upon their chemical forms which areessential to the seafood quality control and nutrition evaluation. Different chemical forms of thesame element was present appeared its physico-chemical properties, its behaviour and toxicity inthe environment, elements in the environment and the existence of biological systems form are verycomplicated, and vulnerable to external conditions, how quickly and accurately to develop themethod of the sample morphology and to analyze the information content is always one of themost challenging tasks to analytical scientists.In the study, combining the separation capability of HPLC with the selectivity andsensitivity of ICP-MS, many elemental species of As, Hg, can be separated in somesamples injection. The aim of the study was to develop a reliable and robust analyticalmethod for elemental speciation analysis in a variety of samples.ICP-MS was used as anion exchange chromatographic detector for speciationanalysis of arsenic. The arsenic species studied include monomethyl arsinic acid（MMA）, dimethyl arsenic acid （DMA）, arsenate （As（V））, p-Arsanilic Acid （p-AsA） andArsenobetaine（AsB）. The choices of HPLC separation conditions were based on theselection and optimization of elutent concentration, methanol concentration and pH.Five extracting solutions had been studied for the purpose:25℃water, boiling water,50%CH₃OH,90%CH₃OH.The optimized AE-ICP-MS method was applied to determine arsenic species inseafood. The major speciation in seafood were MMA、As（V） and DMA, and a smallfraction of the extractable arsenic was AsB. Mercury speciation was methylmercury.Compared the extraction of HCl, secretin and pepsin are three ways to extract the formof mercury in seafood, was found in the different extraction methods, the method candetect the elemental mercury to methylmercury and inorganic mercury in two forms, And the extraction efficiency of mercury to extract the most efficient HCl, secretinbasic inorganic mercury can not be extracted.