Resumen de Evaluation of monolithic column for inorganic mercury and methylmercury determination in fish sample analysis
Manuel A. Bravo, Ornella Riquelme, Sonnia Parra, Jan Bergmann, Waldo Quiroz
In the present work, the applicability of a monolithic column was evaluated for mercury speciation analysis in certified and real fish samples. The influence of the flow and composition of the mobile phase (2-mercaptoethanol concentration and methanol content) on the retention times of iHg and MeHg was evaluated. The optimal separation conditions were achieved for a mobile phase containing 5 % methanol and 0.02 % mercaptoethanol in acetate buffer (pH 5.0) at a flow rate of 1.6 ml min−1. Different extraction conditions were studied to analyze a certified reference material with the optimized methodology and the best results (93 % recovery) were obtained for microwave-assisted extraction with a mixture of HCl 6 M + NaCl 0.5 M. Finally, the proposed method was satisfactorily applied to real fish samples collected from different markets in the central region of Chile, presenting levels ranging from 0.73 – 3.4 mg kg−1.
