Evaluation of extraction procedures for the ion chromatographic determination of arsenic species in plant materials

The determination of arsenic species in plants grown on contaminated sediments and soils is important in order to understand the uptake, transfer and accumulation processes of arsenic. For the separation and detection of arsenic species, hyphenated techniques can be applied successfully in many cases. A lack of investigations exists in the handling (e.g., sampling, pre-treatment and extraction) of redox- and chemically labile arsenic species prior to analysis. This paper presents an application of pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) using water as the solvent for the effective extraction of arsenic species from freshly harvested plants. The method was optimized with respect to extraction time, number of extraction steps and temperature. The thermal stability of the inorganic and organic arsenic species under PLE conditions (60–180°C) was tested. The adaptation of the proposed extraction method to freeze–dried, fine-grained material was limited because of the insufficient reproducibility in some cases.