Speciation analysis of arsenic compounds by capillary electrophoresis on-line coupled with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry using a novel interface

In this work, a capillary electrophoresis (CE) coupled with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS) system was developed for the simultaneous determination of ten arsenic compounds including arsenite, arsenate, monomethylarsonic acid, dimethylarsinic acid, arsenobetaine, arsenocholine, 3-nitro-4-hydroxyphenylarsonic acid, o-Arsanilic acid, p-ureidophenylarsonic acid, and 4-nitrophenylarsonic acid. The CE-ICP-MS system was hyphenated by a novel and high efficient interface which was directly used as the nebulizer. The separation was achieved on a 100 cm length × 50 μm ID fused-silica capillary. Analytical conditions such as electrophoretic buffer composition, concentration and pH value, separation voltage, methanol concentration in the sheath flow liquid and sample injection time were optimized. Baseline separation of the ten arsenic species was achieved using an electrophoretic buffer consisting of 12 mM NaH2PO4 and 8 mM HBO3 at pH 9.20 with an applied voltage of +30 kV. The detection limits of the ten arsenic compounds ranged from 0.9 to 3.0 ng As g−1, corresponding to absolute detection limits in the range of 19–65 fg As and the relative standard deviations (RSD, n = 5) were below 1.5%, 5.7% and 4.8% for migration time, peak height and peak area, respectively. This method was successfully applied to determine various arsenicals in two certified reference materials (TORT-2 and DORM-3) and environmental samples such as ground water samples, herbal plants and chicken meat.