Investigation of the elemental composition and chemical association of several elements in fulvic acids dietary supplements by size-exclusion chromatography UV inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometric

D GRANT, TYRE; G. WUILLOUD, RODOLFO; WUILLOUD, JCA O ALTAMIRANO, JC; A CARUSO, JOSEPH

JOURNAL OF CHROMATOGRAPHY - A

Elsevier

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2004 vol. 1052 p. 313 - 319

0021-9673

Four fulvic acid dietary supplement samples were obtained for this study with the intention of investigating the elemental composition and association of fulvic acids found in fulvic acid supplements. This was achieved by coupling size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) sequentially with UV¿vis and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometric (ICP-MS) detectors. The combination of UV and ICP-MS offered highly sensitive and selective detection. This technique was used in the present study to initially investigate the chemical association of several different elements including, Cr, Co, Ca, Fe, I, Mg, Zn, Se, Cu, Mn, Mo, As, Hg, Pb, and Ag, by observing the elution profile of the fulvic acids obtained with UV detection and matching their retention times with the peaks measured with ICP-MS. The results found based on this type of analysis suggest that there was some association of the elements to the fulvic acids. It was also of interest to observe the stability of these complexes upon human digestion; therefore a gastric digestion was mimicked. In the fulvic acid dietary supplement samples studied, fulvic acids were present in the samples and there was elemental association based on the retention time overlap in the UV as well as the ICP-MS. The fulvic complexes found in the samples were of a low molecular weight As a result of the digestion the SEC-ICP-MS chromatographic profile in some of the samples changed, which may infer that the elemental association had changed.