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Determination of Aflatoxins in Medicinal Herbs by High‐performance Liquid Chromatography–Tandem Mass Spectrometry
Author(s) -
Liu Lina,
Jin Hongyu,
Sun Lei,
Ma Shuangcheng,
Lin Ruichao
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
phytochemical analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.574
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1099-1565
pISSN - 0958-0344
DOI - 10.1002/pca.2343
Subject(s) - chemistry , aflatoxin , chromatography , analyte , mass spectrometry , tandem mass spectrometry , high performance liquid chromatography , liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry , electrospray ionization , medicinal herbs , traditional medicine , food science , medicine
We report a rapid and accurate method to determine the natural occurrence of aflatoxins (AFs) B1, B2, G1 and G2 in medicinal herbs and the analysis of 174 commercial samples by this method. Objective The aim of the present work is to examine the occurrence of the aflatoxins B1, B2, G1 and G2 in common medicinal herbs. Methodology The AFs were extracted, purified by immunoaffinity column and analysed by high‐performance liquid chromatography–tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry with electrospray ionisation (HPLC–MS/MS). Results The AFs can be separated within 6 min using an Agilent XDB C 18 ‐column. The target analyte AFB1 could be detected at 0.14 µg/kg. A good linear relationship was found for AFG1 and AFB1 in 1–100 pg and AFG2 and AFB2 in 0.8–30 pg ( r > 0.9995). The analyte recovery under three different spiking levels was 64–100% with the relative standard deviations (RSD) below 8.19%. Conclusion This simple and accurate method effectively eliminates false positive detection and can be used to determine the AFs in medicinal herbs to control product quality. We found that in the 174 samples tested, 27 were contaminated with AFs. The incidences of AFB1, AFB2, AFG1 and AFG2 in the samples tested were 15.52%, 14.37%, 6.32% and 2.30%, respectively. We proposed 10 µg/kg total AFs and 5 µg/kg AFB1 as the reasonable maximum limits (ML) in medicinal herbs, and there are 10 samples (5.71% occurrence) in our test that exceeded this proposed limit. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.