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 μg Se/L for inorganic Se species and 35–50 μg Se/L for organic Se species.