Arsenic Speciation in Poultry Kidney

• Author / Creator

  Sun, Xuan

• An organoarsenic compound, 3-nitro-4-hydroxyphenyl arsenic acid (also known as Roxarsone), has been used as a feed additive. Roxarsone was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to control diseases in poultry, and to improve weight gain, feed efficiency, and meat pigmentation. Contrary to the previous belief that most of the Roxarsone is excreted unchanged in the manure, researchers from the FDA recently reported increases in inorganic arsenic concentration in the liver of a small number of chickens fed with Roxarsone. This thesis focuses on a much larger scale feeding study, involving a subset of 142 chickens from a total of 1600 chickens over a 35-day period. Within this subset, 71 chickens were fed a Roxarsone-supplemented diet, and the other 71 chickens were fed a control diet not supplemented with Roxarsone. The objectives of this research are to develop a method for arsenic speciation analysis and to quantify arsenic species in chicken kidney. Kidney samples were treated with pepsin, and the extracts were analyzed for arsenic species using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) separation with simultaneous detection by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (ESI MS/MS). The temporal profile of each arsenic species was acquired and the analyses show the presence of eleven arsenic compounds in the extracts of the chicken kidney samples. HPLC-ICP-MS allowed for the quantification of the arsenic species, and ESI MS/MS provided complementary information for the identification of the arsenic species. Results from the analyses of both the control and the Roxarsone-fed chickens are important to our understanding of arsenic metabolism, distribution, and retention in chicken.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Kidneys
  • Arsenic

• Graduation date

  Fall 2014

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3TT4G42N

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.