Trends in selenium determination/speciation by hyphenated techniques based on AAS or AFS

The field of selenium speciation has been studied for decades and the growing interest in this field seems never to reach a plateau. Although powerful techniques based on mass spectrometry are nowadays used for selenium determination/speciation, few laboratories can support the high cost of such techniques. The hyphenation of chromatography to atomic absorption or atomic fluorescence spectrometry (AAS or AFS) is still a reliable and low-cost alternative for routine laboratories. In this work we present the most important parameters dealing with selenium speciation along with the latest trends in this subject, namely in the items related with sample treatment and hyphenation techniques with AAS and AFS detection.