Arsenic Speciation Techniques in Soil Water and Plant: An Overview

There are more than 100 different arsenic with different characteristics in the soil-water-plant ecosystem. The identification and quantification of individual arsenic species is essential for understanding the distribution, environmental fate and behavior, metabolism and toxicity of arsenic. Due to the hazardous nature of arsenic, people have a high interest in the measurement of arsenic species. The reaction of the formation of arsenic speciation in the soil-water-plant environment is briefly studied. There is little information on methods used to quantify arsenic forms and species in contaminated soil, water and plant. The purpose of this article is to understand the available sample pretreatment, extraction, separation, detection and method validation techniques for arsenic speciation analysis of arsenic species in soil, water and plant. The performances of various sample preparation and extraction processes, as well as effective separation techniques, that contribute greatly to excellent sensitivity and selectivity in arsenic speciation when coupling with suitable detection mode, and method validity are discussed. The outlines of arsenic speciation techniques are discussed in view of the importance to the completeness and accuracy of analytical data in the soil-water-plant samples. To develop cheap, fast, sensitive, and reproducible techniques with low detection limits, still needed to confine research on arsenic speciation present in environmental matrices.