Overview of speciation chemistry of arsenic

Abstract

Studies on the speciation of arsenic in environmental and biological samples are subject of current inte-rest. Because of the low level of arsenic species in real samples, many problems related with its speciation remain unresolved: species instability during samp-ling, storage and sample treatment, incomplete recovery of all species, matrix interferences, lack of appropriate certified reference materials and of sensitiv analytical methods, etc. The continued development of new ana-lytical procedures to solve some of these problems claim for an up-to-date knowledge of the recent publi-cations. The analytical figures of merit, specially detection limits are given for most of the methods in order to afford comparison and judge possible appli-cability. These studies, which have been approached in