New adsorbents based on imprinted polymers and composite nanomaterials for arsenic and mercury screening/speciation: A review

Non-essential trace elements, especially mercury (Hg) and arsenic (As), and their speciation analysis in fish and fishery products have gained increasing attention regarding human exposure, risk assessment and toxicological endpoints. Reliable, robust and sophisticated hyphenated laboratory instrumentation is available today, providing very low quantification limits for total element contents and single element species. Not only the instrumentation but also fast and reliable novel sample pre-treatment methods are important, and challenges in speciation analysis are focused on developing new low cost and fast screening methods. This review includes the developments on molecularly/ionic imprinted polymers (MIPs/IIPs) based solid phase extraction and quantum dots (QDs) for Hg and As determination/speciation.