A stationary cold-vapor technique for the determination of submicrogram amounts of mercury in biological tissues by flameless atomic absorption spectrophotometry.

A procedure is provided for the determination of mercury in animal tissue using a single unit stationary cold-vapor generator utilizing atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The entire reduction-absorption cell is fitted to the burner mount on the instrument. Sample digests are introduced into the sample compartment along with reductant, and background corrected absorbance is measured after three minutes of sample-reductant mixing. The method is sensitive to 2 ng Hg (0.50 ng/mL Hg at 0.0044 absorbance units), which corresponds to 25 ng Hg per gram wet tissue using the prescribed digestion procedure. Reproducibility and accuracy are comparable to conventional cold-vapor techniques and the fact that relatively small sample aliquots (4.0 mL) are used for analysis provides for multideterminations of Hg in a single tissue digest; this is not ordinarily possible using conventional cold-vapor methods. A total of 15 digested tissue sample can be analyzed per hour. The method is proposed as an alterative to presently used cold-vapor Hg techniques.