ELEMENT SPECIATION - CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

A significant contribution to the further progress of environmental sciences is acknowledged to be linked to the development of innovative methodologies for the chemical speciation of elements in a variety of ecosystems. The identification, separation, and quantification of the forms under which an element may be present in a given matrix, in fact, are crucial to an effective assessment of its global impact on the environment and eventually on human health, as a greatly different noxious potential may characterize each species. A brief survey is presented to illustrate the most successful experimental approaches developed to date in this field, with particular reference to hyphenated instrumental methods which combine high-performance liquid chromatography with inductively coupled plasma-based spectroscopic techniques. Selected ongoing studies are also reported which provide evidence of the relevance of this kind of investigation to life sciences. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.