Sensitive Determination Method for Mercury Ion, Methyl-, Ethyl-, and Phenyl-mercury in Water and Biological Samples Using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography with Chemiluminescence Detection

Abstract

A sensitive determination method for mercury speciation analysis was developed. Four mercury species, mercury ion, methylmercury, ethylmercury, and phenylmercury, were complexed with emetine-dithiocarbamate (emetine-CS2), and then injected onto a HPLC instrument coupled with a tris(2,2′-bipyridine)ruthenium(III) chemiluminescence detection system. The emetine-CS2 complexing agent was effectively used to measure the concentration in addition to serving as a separation and detection reagent. The calibration curves for these mercury complexes were linear in the range of 0.050 -10 μg L -1 (as Hg). The limit of detection for (emetine-CS2)2Hg, emetine-CS2-methylmercury, emetine-CS2-ethylmercury, and emetine-CS2-phenylmercury were 30, 17, 21, and 22 ng L -1 , respectively. The sensitivity of this method enables the determination of mercury species in water samples at sub-ppb levels. Furthermore, the method was applied to biological samples in combination with acid leaching and liquid-liquid extraction using emetine-CS2 as an extraction reagent. The determination results were in good agreement with the values of the certified reference materials.

Dual Colorimetric Sensor for Hg2+/Pb2+ and an Efficient Catalyst Based on Silver Nanoparticles Mediating by the Root Extract of Bistorta amplexicaulis

“…Purification of wastewater using novel environmentally friendly methods is becoming a hot research topic from the last few decades (Yu et al, 2017;Bolisetty et al, 2019). Several classical methods are reported in the literature for the selective detection of Hg 2+ and Pb 2+ , including atomic absorption spectrometry, ICP-MS method (Karunasagar et al, 1998;Fong et al, 2007), GC-atomic fluorescence (Nevado et al, 2005), HPLC (Kodamatani et al, 2012), Fluorescence sensor (Chang et al, 2007;Chiang et al, 2008), conjugated polymers (Liu et al, 2007), ratiometric (Yarur et al, 2019), oligonucleotides (Ono and Togashi, 2004;Lin et al, 2011;Lu et al, 2013), proteins (Guo and Irudayaraj, 2011), bioluminescent bacterial sensors (Durand et al, 2015), and electrochemical sensing (Zhu et al, 2017) etc. All the above-mentioned methods used expensive instrumentation, time-consuming sample preparation steps, and more laborious.…”

Study of Lignin-Modified Silica Gel Adsorption after Association with Six Different Organophenylmercuric Compounds in Chloroform

“…Many capillary electrophoresis (CE)- [ 6 , 7 ], gas chromatography (GC)-, and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-related [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ] separation techniques associated with preconcentration extraction methods had, in some cases, been developed prior to the analysis of inorganic mercury or oganomercury present in the environment or in biological samples. The extraction mechanism leading to the analyte’s preconcentration was involved in either the complexation or exchanging of mercury species with a sulfur-containing agent.…”

Aminobenzene sulfonic acid-functionalized carbon nanotubes on glassy carbon electrodes for probing traces of mercury(II)

“…Nowadays, different methods and strategies based on various signal-generation principles have been developed for Hg(II) quantification, such as atomic fluorescence spectrometry, 4,5 atomic absorption spectrometry, 6 inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, 3,7 inductively coupled plasma atomic emis-sion spectrometry, 8 high-performance liquid chromatography, 9 ion chromatography, 10 colorimetric detection 11 and sensing strategy. Despite the high sensitivity of conventional methods, they have some limitations, such as high operating costs, inadequate detection limits, or expensive instrumentation.…”