Chromatographic separation of mercury species.
To separate inorganic divalent mercury, methylmercury
and ethylmercury species, we applied reversed-phase
chromatography on the octylated stationary phase and
various mobile phases containing 2-ME. This choice,
in contrast with a more common octadecylated phase,
could enable to use a mobile phase with a low content of
an organic solvent, which is advantageous for ICP-MS
detection. We tested the influence of methanol content
and the presence of buffering component on the
species separation. Figure 1 shows the corresponding
chromatograms. The order of elution was: MeHg,
inorganic HgII and EtHg, which was consistent with
reported data (Lin et al. 2008).