Determination of inorganic mercury in biological tissues by cold vapor atomic absorption spectrometry following tetramethylammonium hydroxide solubilization

Abstract

A rapid and simple method for the quantification of inorganic and total mercury in biological tissues using flow injection cold vapor generation atomic absorption spectrometry is presented. Samples were solubilized using tetramethylammonium hydroxide. The inorganic Hg was released by on-line addition of L-cysteine and then reduced to metallic Hg by SnCl₂. The detection limit for inorganic mercury was 0.1 µg l^–1 and the precision of determination was better than 2% (RSD) at 20 µg l^–1. The proposed method was validated by the analyses of a suite of certified marine biological reference materials, DORM-2 (dogfish muscle), DOLT-2 (dogfish liver) and TORT-2 (lobster hepatopancreas).