Arsenic Species Analysis at Trace Level by High Performance Liquid Chromatography with Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry

Hongfang Hou,Zhanhui Tao,Yafei Guo,Wanjing Cui,Tianlong Deng,Qing Xu

doi:10.1155/2019/3280840

Abstract

A sensitive and accurate simultaneous continuous analysis for six arsenic species including arsenobetaine (AsB), arsenocholine (AsC), monomethylarsonic acid (MMA), dimethylarsinic acid (DMA), arsenite (AsIII), and arsenate (AsV) has been developed by high performance liquid chromatography with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (HPLC-ICP-MS). An anion-exchange column of Hamilton PRP-X100 (Switzerland) was applied for separation of the six arsenic species with gradient elution of 1.25 mmol/L Na2HPO4 and 11.0 mmol/L KH2PO4 as the mobile phase A and 2.5 mmol/L Na2HPO4 and 22.0 mmol/L KH2PO4 as the mobile phase B. The linearity ranges for AsB, AsC, MMA, DMA, AsIII, and AsV were between 0.5 and 50.0 μg/L, and the detection limits of the six arsenic species were all within 0.01–0.35 ng/L. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) were within 2.26–3.68% and the recovery rates of samples ranged from 95 to 103%. The proposed method was applied for the arsenic speciation analysis of sediment pore-water samples, which were taken from the supernatant after centrifugation and filtration.

Highlights

Arsenic as a typical toxic element [1, 2] is considered as one of the primary pollutants, and the detriment of arsenic to human body is secular and chronic
Considering that the sampler and skimmer cones of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) would be blocked if the sodium salt concentration was too high, resulting in signal suppression [23], reducing the mobile phase concentration was adopted to analyze the arsenic species
It was clearly shown that high performance liquid chromatography with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (HPLC-ICP-MS) can be perfectly applied in the determination of six arsenic species (AsB, AsC, monomethylarsonic acid (MMA), dimethylarsinic acid (DMA), AsIII, and AsV) by one single anion- exchange column using sodium hydrogen phosphate and monopotassium phosphate as eluent

Summary

Introduction

Arsenic as a typical toxic element [1, 2] is considered as one of the primary pollutants, and the detriment of arsenic to human body is secular and chronic. Arsenic in sediment, water body, and atmosphere mainly existed in the form of inorganic compounds including arsenate and arsenite. It is worth noting that ICPMS has been proverbially used in all kinds of samples such as in urine [15, 16], ground water [17, 18], and food [19, 20], but the arsenic species simultaneous continuous measurement using HPLC-ICP-MS in the sediment pore-water samples has not been reported. We present a practical and sensitive method for the quantification of arsenite, arsenate, and organic arsenic species in sediment pore-water samples

Experimental

Results and Discussion

Conclusions