Quantitative determination of total sulfur in plant tissues using acid digestion and ion-chromatography

(...) Since ion-chromatography has demonstrated versatility in inorganic ion analysis, it was adopted in this paper to measure SO 4 in wet acid digests of plant materials. Plant tissues (200 mg) were digested with 2 mL HNO 3 + 1 mL 70% HClO 4 and subsequently evaporated to dryness in order to minimize the HClO 4 concentration for efficient ion-chromatography. Magnesium oxide was dissolved in HNO 3 at a rate of 1.25 gL −1 to provide cations to prevent the losses of S gases. Dionex OmniPac PAX-500 analytical column was used to provide simultaneous anion exchange and reverse-phase ion-chromatography (...)