A simple method development for the analysis of organic mercury in different environmental matrices

摘要

The presence of organic mercury in environmental and biological matrices deserves special attention, due to the extreme toxicity of these species (namely methylmercury) and ability to enter and biomagnify up in the trophic chain. Therefore, mercury speciation analysis has become an important issue of the present analytical research, with the specific purpose of finding simple and rapid methodologies. In the present work, the methodology proposed for the determination of organic mercury in fish, plant and sediment certified reference materials (CRM), it is based on an organic solvent extraction procedure followed by the quantitative determination by pyrolysis absorption atomic spectrometry (AAS). The results obtained assure the performance of the method, with recovery factors higher than 97 percent for all certified reference materials and revealed a good precision of the methodology.