Selenium speciation by interfacing capillary electrophoresis with inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry

The high resolution potential of capillary electrophoresis (CE) makes CE techniques valuable for separations of selenium species. Further, inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) affords element-specific multi-element detection, providing extremely low detection limits. The combination of CE with ICP-MS promises to become a powerful tool for metal speciation. Therefore, an on-line hyphenation of CE with ICP-MS, which was developed earlier (Michalke, B., Schramel, P., Fresenius' J. Anal. Chem. 1997, 257, 594-599), was modified and applied to selenium speciation. For this reason, capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) methods were developed, providing the possibility to analyze six Se species of interest in one run: Se (IV), Se (VI), selenium carrying glutathione (GSSeSG), selenomethionine (SeM), selenocystine (SeC), and selenocystamine (SeCM). The final CE method used an alkaline background electrolyte (Na2CO3/NaOH) with separation differentiated from the detection step during hyphenation. This resulted in short separation times (10 min) and a subsequent detection step of 100s. The Se species were sufficiently separated from each other and appeared at 7s (SeCM), 16s (Se [VI]), 22s [SeC], 27s (Se [IV]), 35s [SeM] and 56s (GSSeSG) during the detection step. Detection limits were calculated as 10 or 20 microg Se/L for inorganic Se species and 35-50 microg Se/L for organic Se species.