INTERNATIONAL IUPAC SYMPOSIUM FOR TRACE ELEMENTS IN FOOD (TEF)

5th International IUPAC Symposium for Trace Elements in Food (TEF-5) 2014

PP076 - Arsenic Speciation in Food Materials using Hydride Generation Atomic Fluorescence Spectrometry (HG-AFS) with Automatic Online Solid Phase Extraction (SPE)

Authors: Dr Bin Chen, Dr Warren T Corns (PSA), and Mr Cornelius Brombach (Uni of Aberdeen)

The adverse health risk of arsenic (As) and its widespread occurrence in the environment as well as in the food chain has raised great public concerns worldwide. Therefore, a routine screening of As concentrations in food materials has become more of an urgent task for food authorities in many countries. It is already well known that speciation, rather than just total As concentration is the key to fully understand the toxicity of As in food products.
HG-AFS offers several advantages for this task such as low cost, high sensitivity and fast analysis. Selective hydride generation atomic fluorescence spectrometry (SHG-AFS) has already been successfully applied to the analysis of inorganic and total arsenic in rice samples with method detection limits (MDL) of 1 and 3 ng g-1, respectively. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) together with HG-AFS has also been used to provide the most precise speciation information in food material.

In this presentation, an automatic online SPE approach is demonstrated for arsenic speciation in food materials.  The system is consisting of an autosampler, a 6-port injection valve and a HG-AFS analyser. Sample loop is made of an inline cartridge which contains strong anion exchange packing material. No HPLC was required.  The loading of sample extracts, clean-up of the cartridge, elution and detection of the As species was done automatically using a software package developed in house.  The performance of the system will be discussed in detail in the presentation.

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