Research and analysis

GC publishes a technical report on mycotoxin screening using QuEChERS

Report describing research works carried out by the Government Chemist to explore the possibilities of applying QuEChERS to the analysis of mycotoxins in various food matrices

Documents

Evaluation of QuEChERS for mycotoxin screening

Request an accessible format.
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email government.chemist@lgcgroup.com. Please tell us what format you need. It will help us if you say what assistive technology you use.

Details

Mycotoxins are toxic secondary metabolites produced by certain fungal species such as Aspergillus and Fusarium and can appear in a great variety of foods resulting from mould contamination in the field or during storage.

Due to the complexity of food matrices and structural diversity of mycotoxins their simultaneous and sensitive analysis is challenging.

Extraction methods based on QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe) have become more popular in the research field of mycotoxins due to its simplicity and effectiveness for isolating mycotoxins from complex matrices.

This report describes the work performed by the Government Chemist team to investigate various appropriate extraction and clean-up approaches applied to cereal matrices (maize flour, wheat flour, pasta, bread, breakfast cereals and beer), black peppercorn and groundnuts (peanuts).

The report concludes with a general strategy which includes workflows based on QuEChERS for the screening of mycotoxins. The proposed strategy represents an alternative to existing lengthy clean-up methods for specific mycotoxins.

For more information on the research work performed by the Government Chemist contact:

Government Chemist

Queens Road
Teddington
TW11 0LY

Updates to this page

Published 21 August 2019

Sign up for emails or print this page