Scientific Study

BACKGROUND: Mycotoxins, which may contaminate peanut and peanut products, are responsible for many diseases to human beings. AflatoxinB1(AFB1), aflatoxinG1(AFG1), aflatoxinB2(AFB2), aflatoxinG2(AFG2), ochratoxin A(OTA) and zearalenone(ZEN) are considered the most relevant groups of mycotoxins found in food. This work aimed to develop a high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detector(HPLC-FLD) combined with dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction(DLLME) method for the simultaneous determination of the six mycotoxins in peanuts. The six mycotoxins were simultaneously determined under their best wavelength by means of changing wavelength. RESULTS: Under the optimum conditions, the linear ranges were 1 ~ 100 ng mL^-1 for AFB1, AFG1 and OTA, 0.3 ~ 30 ng mL^-1 for AFB2 and AFG2, 5 ~ 1000 ng mL^-1 for ZEN, with the correlation coefficient(R2) of 0.9969 ~ 0.9997. Limits of detection(LODs) were 0.10, 0.10, 0.30, 0.03, 0.03 and 1.0 µg kg^-1, respectively, and the mean recoveries were in the range of 83.1% to 99.3% with RSD<10%(n=6, independent analysis).Thirteen(46%) of these tested samples were contaminated with at least one mycotoxin. CONCLUSION: The proposed method was demonstrated to be simple, highly selective, accurate, reliable, and was successfully applied to simultaneously analyze of the six mycotoxins in real peanut samples from China.