How to Deal with Mercury in Sediments? A Critical Review About Used Methods for the Speciation of Mercury in Sediments

Species-specific isotope dilution analysis of monomethylmercury in sediment using GC/ICP-ToF-MS and comparison with ICP-Q-MS and ICP-SF-MS

“…It was shown in previous works that Hg 0 is produced by reduction of analytes during sample preparation and/or analysis [ 44 ], whereas the amount of Hg 0 present in the sample is lost during freeze-drying. Since it is described as rather unstable [ 24 ], EtHg most probably originates from the sample and is not an artifact, but the amount of EtHg indicated by the peak size seems to be surprisingly high. Unfortunately, due to the noted instability, quantification of EtHg is difficult, which is also highlighted by the lack of appropriate reference materials.…”

“…Natural background levels of Hg in soils and sediments are thought to be in the order of 0.1 mg/kg [20,22], corresponding to natural MMHg mass fractions between 0.1 and 1 μg/kg. Due to its lipophilicity and strong affinity to thiol groups present in biomolecules containing the amino acid cysteine [24]. MMHg h a s a h i g h p o t e n t i a l f o r b i o a c c u m u l a t i o n a n d biomagnification.…”

Atomic spectrometry update: review of advances in elemental speciation

“…Following the pattern of recent years there is still a strong interest in mercury speciation and this topic has been reviewed with respect to the analysis of sediments for different Hg species. 128 The review, which cites 230 papers, gives a brief overview of the environmental chemistry of Hg before considering six different areas: storage and pre-treatment of samples, reference materials, extraction methods, preconcentration procedures, the separation of Hg species and finally detectors. It is good to see method validation with the use of appropriate CRMs at the beginning of the review, which contains a table of available suitable CRMs, and the authors point out that if possible not only should the matrix be matched but also if possible the Hg species mass fraction as well.…”

Organo-mercury species in a polluted agricultural flood plain: Combining speciation methods and polymerase chain reaction to investigate pathways of contamination

“…Generally, they involve 1) an extraction step (acid, alkaline or distillation), 2) a purification (derivatization or solvent extraction) and 3) chromatographic separation and analysis (HPLC-ICP-MS or GC-CVAFS). To date, there is no standardized technique for the quantification of organic Hg species (Hellmann et al, 2019;Jagtap and Maher, 2015).…”