A group led by Kevin A. Francesconi, professor of chemistry at the University of Graz, in Austria, has now isolated arsenic-containing oil from capelin by heating and compressing whole fish and extracting the oil with hexane. The researchers then used high-performance liquid chromatography to purify arsenolipids in the oil.
By analyzing the purified fractions with mass spectrometry for arsenic specxiation analysis, they identified three different arsenic-containing compounds: two dimethylarsinoyl alkanes and a dimethylarsinoyl alkene.