Determination of Total Arsenic and Arsenic Metabolites in Human Liver Hepatocytes

In this article, the effects of three digestion methods on the determination of arsenic in Chang liver hepatocytes after ultrasonication were compared with direct sampling. The results showed that the efficiency of microwave digestion and obturator digestion was better than that of cold digestion and direct sampling. The daily precision (present as RSD) of As determination with the sample treatment of microwave digestion and obturator digestion was 2.14% and 1.21%, the interday precision of the determinations was 1.15% and 1.97%. The spike recovery for the total As in the sample is in the range of 95.7%–108.1%. The As detection limits with these four sample treatment methods (including direct sampling) were among 0.74–0.93 μg l−1. In addition, arsenic species in Chang liver hepatocytes were also analyzed using the hyphenated technique of high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. The experimental results indicated that dimethylarsinic acid and an intermediate metabolite of DMA were found in Chang liver hepatocytes besides inorganic arsenic (As(III) and As(V)).