Non-chromatographic atomic spectrometric methods in speciation analysis: A review

In recent years, knowledge of the different chemical forms of the elements has gained increasing importance. There has been significant progress in methods that hyphenate chromatographic separations with atomic spectrometry. These hyphenated methods can provide the most complete information on the species distribution and even structure. However, they can be lengthy, relatively costly and difficult to bring to the routine. On the other hand, it is important to remember that chromatographic techniques represent only a minor part of the separation procedures available and, in certain cases, the application of basic chemistry to sample treatments can give quantitative information about specific chemical forms. In this sense, non-chromatographic procedures can provide methods that offer sufficient information on the elemental speciation for a series of situations. Moreover, these non-chromatographic strategies can be less time consuming, more cost effective and available, and present competitive limits of detection. Thus, non-chromatographic speciation analysis continues to be a promising research area and has been applied to the development of several methodologies that facilitate this type of analytical approach. In view of their importance, the present work overviews and discusses different non-chromatographic methods as alternatives for the speciation analysis of clinical, environmental and food samples using atomic spectrometry for detection.