Mercury is one of the most toxic elements to living organisms, so reliable quantitative analysis is extremely important. Mercury exists at relatively low concentrations in the environment, but with its amplification through the food chain, the final concentration in some foods can be quite high. In addition, its toxicity is linked to both its total concentration and the chemical species. Therefore, mercury speciation in food analysis is necessary to fully estimate the toxic potential of this element to humans. The Agilent 7700x ICP-MS enables fast, simple mercury speciation – even in conjunction with gradient HPLC analyses that pose challenges to plasma stability on some other ICP-MS instruments