Determination of methyl mercury in humic-rich natural water samples using N2-distillation with isotope dilution and on-line purge and trap GC-ICP-MS

Methods and recent advances in speciation analysis of mercury chemical species in environmental samples: a review

“…[5] However, PE containers are not recommended in speciation analysis due to rapid degradation of OrgHg, species inter-conversion, and surface adsorption. [34] PTFE, [36] FLPE, [21,35] PET, Pyrex glass, and quartz [37] containers are advisable for the storage of Hg sample solutions. [34] Quartz is not economical, and hence cannot be used for routine analysis.…”

“…Since the concentration of Hg in environmental samples might be at trace level, the Hg speciation analysis requires the sample pre-treatment and pre-concentration methods such as SPE, [8] SPME, [9] HF-LLLME, [10,11] DLLME, [12][13][14][15][16] SDME, [17,18] CPE, [19] and P&T. [20][21][22][23] Separation and determination techniques including LC, GC, and CE coupled to ICP-MS, [3,10,12,[24][25][26] PJD-AFS, [27] AFS (HG/CV-AFS), [9,28] and CV-AAS [9] have been used. As well, particular attention has to be paid to the sampling, transportation, and proper sample storage procedures.…”

“…Water sample is usually filtered with 0.22 μm [12,26,[37][38][39][40] or 0.45 μm [5,9,14,17,36,[41][42][43][44] pore size membrane filters to avoid particulate materials and treated with acidic solutions of HNO 3 [9,36,45] or HCl [17,21,35,38,46] to preserve the analytes and also to prevent the formation of microbes. The appropriate sample storage place and temperature has been reported to be in dark and 4 °C, respectively.…”

“…The appropriate sample storage place and temperature has been reported to be in dark and 4 °C, respectively. [5,12,14,17,21,39,[44][45][46] In recent, SPME [30,47] and DGT [48][49][50] methods have shown to be the promising approach for the storage of Hg species in the analysis of environmental samples. In these techniques, the analytes are adsorbed and stabilized on the solid materials in the field which is easy to transport and store rather than in a liquid phase, and it also minimize the analyte loss.…”

“…P&T is a technique which involve purging a liquid/solid samples with inert gases such as argon, [20] helium [21,72] or nitrogen [23,52] at ambient or slightly elevated temperature and trap the volatile analytes on Tenax, [20,21,23,52,72] as a solid sorbent followed by desorption for GC analysis. It is the most effective and commonly used extraction/pre-concentration technique in speciation analysis of Hg by GC.…”