Metal speciation and bioavailability: revisiting the ‘big questions’

Janet G. Hering

doi:10.1071/EN09021

RESEARCH FRONT

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Metal speciation and bioavailability: revisiting the ‘big questions’

Janet G. Hering

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Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Überlandstrasse 133, CH-8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland. Email: janet.hering@eawag.ch

Janet Hering is the Director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science & Technology (Eawag) and Professor of Environmental Biogeochemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETHZ). From 1996 to 2006, she was a Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Prior to 1996, she was an Assistant and later Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA. Her research interests include the biogeochemical cycling of trace elements in natural waters and water treatment technologies for the removal of inorganic contaminants from potable water.

Environmental Chemistry 6(4) 290-293 https://doi.org/10.1071/EN09021
Submitted: 14 February 2009 Accepted: 12 June 2009 Published: 25 August 2009

Environmental context. Four decades of research on metal speciation and bioavailability have failed to answer the ‘big questions’ of the ecological consequences of metal stress. Important, though still insufficient, insights have been gained from analytical approaches derived from inorganic environmental chemistry (targeting the quantification of free metal ion or ‘labile’ metal concentrations) and from organic environmental chemistry (focusing on the structure of ambient metal species). The ‘omics’ approach, not yet widely applied to this topic, offers the possibility of providing sufficient information to identify a quantitative signature of metal stress.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank P. Nirel (Geneva Cantonal Department of Interior) and my Eawag colleagues R. Behra, R. Eggen, and L. Sigg for helpful discussions of this topic and three anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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Metal speciation and bioavailability: revisiting the ‘big questions’

Acknowledgements

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