Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
The origin and fate of butyltin compounds in the environment have been extensively studied in the past few years [1–6]. As described in Chapters 6 and 7 of this book, the toxicological impact of tributyltin (TBT) on marine organisms has been the major reason for a multitude of studies elucidating the biogeochemical pathway of this contaminant, together with its degradation products mono- and dibutyltin (MBT and DBT), in the environment. This interest and concern for the determination of butyltin compounds led to the development in the early 1980s of a wide variety of techniques which involve, in most cases, several different analytical steps: extraction, clean-up, derivatization, separation and final detection [7]. It is clear that accurate results for butyltin determinations is a prerequisite for good comparability of data and related studies on the toxicity and biogeochemical processes. However, the proliferation of multi-step techniques, although very sensitive, was not accompanied with the necessary awareness for the quality control of analysis. Only in the past five years has the availability of certified reference materials (CRMs), certified for their butyltin concentrations, allowed an improvement in the quality assurance of butyltin determinations in marine sediments. The overall quality of butyltin determinations is, however, far from being under control. Many techniques still need to be validated, some analytical steps (e.g. hydride generation) are often badly understood, and the number of CRMs is not sufficient to ensure a wide coverage of environmental and biological matrices.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.