Advanced speciation and localisation techniques to characterise arsenic in plants and soils

There has been somewhat of a revolution in analytical techniques to speciate and localise metal(loid)s in environmental materials. Arsenic has come to the fore as a human carcinogen whose major exposure route to humans is through plants. To unravel arsenic's complex environmental dynamics advanced speciation techniques have been developed, namely synchrotron based approaches to localise arsenic, and to speciate it, within plants; and advanced chromatographic techniques such as HPLC-ICP-MS-LC-MS, to give concurrent inorganic and organic mass spectrometry for chromatographic separations enabling characterising of arsenic complexes. These approaches will be outlined with respect to biogeochemical cycling of arsenic in plant-soil systems.

Invited by Britta Planer-Friedrich