ENVIROTRACE · Assessment of organotin compounds in the environment of Greece

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Project objective

Research on metal speciation techniques has recently become one of the fastest growing area of analytical chemistry. The tandem combination of instruments has opened up a new area of research. The so-called hyphenated techniques seem to be the methods of choice to achieve both the sensitivity and specificity requirements. This term denotes a combination of a separation technique, usually high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) or gas chromatography (GC), and a metal-selective technique such as AAS or AES. The proposed project Assessment of Organotin Compounds in the Environment of Greece" deals with the setting up and further improvement of hyphenated techniques based on the coupling of HPLC with QFAAS, for the identification and determination of these compounds in complex environmental matrices. It combines two areas of scientific expertise representing the current state-of-art in the field: * Analytical methods based on HPLC-HG-QFAAS for organometallic compounds that can be converted into hydrides, such as organotin, organoselenium, organoarsenium etc. A direct, continuous, and on-line interface through the use of a post-column hydride generator to link up the HPLC and the AA furnace will be set up. The hydride generator interface has the advantage of isolating the analytes from the sample stream, thus avoinding any interferences due to the sample. The organometallic compounds are conveted into their hydrides by addition of NaBH4 and are drained to the gas-liquid separator. Then, the volatile hydrides produced are atomised in a flame-heatedquartz tube. In this design, the sensitivity of the detector increases by allowing the analyte to remain for a longer period in the optical path. * The improved and optimized methods will be applied for the determination of organotin species in environmental matrices like sea and natural waters, biological samples (fish etc.), thus producing unique quantitative data on the presence of alkyltin compounds in coastal Mediterranian regions. The use of the hyphenated technique once being set up should be expanded for speciation studies of other organometallic compounds of elements such as As, Se, Sb. Since only a few data on contamination of the Mediterranian basin with organometallic compounds are available due to the lack of special equipment required and of specilized researchers on hyphenated techniques this project is considered as fundamental for the Mediterranian basin, both from analytical chemical and ecological point of view. "

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki · ThessalonikiCoordinatorGreece
• Not availableCity levelGreece

Links

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