A Review of Recent Developments in Sample Pretreatment, Separation and Hyphenated Atomic and Mass Spectrometric Techniques for Organoselenium Speciation in Biological Liquids

Since organoselenium species like selenoaminoacids, selenopeptides, alkylselenides etc. and also the inorganic species selenite (Se (IV)) and selenate (Se (VI)) are known to be present in biological liquids and tissues, some of them playing an important role, there is a constant demand to develop or improve current analytical methodologies in order to enable species-specific detection and determination of these species in biological samples. The availability of various atomization techniques in atomic spectrometry and also of various ionization techniques in mass and tandem mass spectrometry have significantly increased the analytical armoury for organoselenium speciation. The literature in this field is abundant and fast growing, thus in this review only recent developments reported during the last decade and referring to the application of modern hyphenated techniques based on atomic or mass spectrometric detection are reviewed. The available information is classified according to the sample pretreatment procedures applied, the separation techniques and detectors used.