My research interest is the methylation of arsenic in environment.

First of all, anything on this page is my personal opinion, ideas, or facts without any scientific proof.

Here in DE, poultry is big industry.  Chickens are fed an organoarsenic compound, roxarsone, as growth promote.  The most of this compound generally comes out from chicken and accumulates in litter.  The litter may have high arsenic concentration.  The litter is then applied to field as fertilizer.  DE soils have a lot of sand and usually do not sustain As in soil.  As concentration in soils is quite low.  As concentration in ground water is also low, considering the amount of roxarsone applied to chicken.  General question is where is As.  We thought large amount of As becomes gas compounds, methylarsines, via methylation.

I started looking the process in soil and litter.  My experiment did not measure the amount of gas compounds came out, but the amount of As before and after the experiment.  The difference between two number suppose to be the amount of gas compounds.  The results are not shown here, but briefly the difference is very small.  I may conclude As loss via methylation is not significant in DE soil or litter.  This is also supported by experiments by other researchers (real research).

I changed my research topic from methylation of arsenic to methylarsenic, such as MonoMethylArsenic or DiMmethylArsenic.  MMA and DMA are used as pesticides.  The behavior of these compounds can influence arsenate-arsenite occurrence in ground water.  Methylation is a huge subject, and I dissect the process into pieces.  Each piece is then analyzed with various techniques.  I hope I can see a big picture after the dissection.