Thereisagrowinginterestindeterminingmercury(Hg)levelsinthemarineenvironmentaswellasinfishforhumanconsumption.Methylmercury(MeHg)inparticularisthemosttoxicandbioaccumulati... There is a growing interest in determining mercury(Hg) levels in the marine environment as well as in fish for human consumption.
Methyl mercury(Me Hg)in particular is the most toxic and bioaccumulative form of mercury in food webs and it is the predominant chemical form making up 80%-90% of the total mercury present in fish muscle tissue.Hence,fish and
other organisms at the end of the food chain constitute the
major source of MeHg in the human . As outcome of this risk,MeHg has been classically monitored in fish, and methodologies for mercury speciaion have increased significantly since the early 1990s. Currently, microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) has provided an efficient alternative strategy to conventional techniques for solvent extraction of a large amount of organometals compounds.The analytical techniques most frequently applied for Hg speciation analysis involve GC(GasChromatography) , GC-CICP-MS(Gas Chromatography -CInductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry)
supercritical fluids chromatography (SFC),ion chromatograph(IC), HPLC-CCVAAS(High Performance Liqui
Chromatography-Cold Vapor Atomic Absorption Spectrometry) or ICP-MS systems .Several authors recommended a back-extraction of mercury species from organic solvents to cysteine or sodium thiosulphate aqueous solutions .Because MeHg is the most common organomercury compound in biological materials ,here we offer a new simple and cost-effective method to determine MeHg. Basically, this method combines the microwave assisted extraction followed by clean-up with cysteine acetate solution and MeHg quantification by a direct mercury analyzer (DMA). 展開(kāi)