Voltammetric study of the interaction between Se(IV) and dissolved organic matter in environmental aqueous matrices Original Research Article

The paper deals with the interaction of selenium with several organic compounds (of high molecular weight). The considered species should be similar in structure and properties to those responsible for analytical problems encountered in the determination of selenium in aqueous environmental samples. The approach is the same adopted for studying the complexing capacity of water samples towards heavy metals. Particularly, some polysaccharides of different structure and molecular weight have been considered and for each species, the interaction constant has been evaluated. These constants are of the same order of magnitude of those determined for real samples for “unknown” species, indicating the reliability of the adopted approach. Finally, the interaction constants seem related to the molecular weight of the considered polysaccharides.