Background Different arsenic species vary greatly in toxicity. Determinaton of arsenic species in hair has great significance to the study of arsenic metabolism mechanism in human body because hair is the main part to accumulate arsenic in patents with chronic arsenic poisoning.
Objective This study aims to establish a method for determining four arsenic species in hair samples by high performance liquid chromatography-atomic fluorescence spectrometry (HPLC-AFS).
Methods The effect of mobile phase on chromatography separation was investigated. Orthogonal experiment design was used to optimize sample pretreatment conditions and atomic fluorescence spectrometry (AFS) detecton parameters. Methodological indicators were investgated including intra-and inter-batch relatve standard deviatons (RSD) and average spike recovery.
Results The method showed that four arsenic species including arsenite (AsⅢ), arsenate (AsV), monomethylarsonic acid (MMAV), and dimethylarsinic acid (DMAV) were linear within the range of 3.68-100.00 μg/L. The correlaton coefcients were 0.999 1-0.999 6. The limits of detecton were 0.11-0.19 μg/g. The average spike recoveries were 96.5%-102.8% with RSD between 2.4% and 4.3%. The intra-and inter-batch RSDs of repettve measurement at 10.00, 40.00, and 80.00 μg/L were 1.5%-4.4% and 1.9%-4.6% respectvely.
Conclusion The proposed method can be applied to the analysis of four arsenic species in hair samples with high sensitvity.
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