Determination of Total Aflatoxins in Foods by Parallelism of ELISA and LC/MS/MS

High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC/MS) have been widely used to quantify aflatoxins in food, but these methods are expensive, time-consuming, unsuitable for analysis of the routine screening of large sample numbers and require derivatization and high level techniques to perform. The objective of this study is to detect aflatoxins in a large number of foods by a high efficient analytical system of combined enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for screening and LC/MS/MS for confirmation. The samples spiked individually with aflatoxin (0.5 and 1.0 ng/g) and total aflatoxins (10 ng/g) were analyzed by ELISA and LC/MS/ MS, and the recoveries for ELISA and LC/MS/MS were 71.8~119.2% and 70.8~135.3%, respectively. A total of 378 samples (grains, nuts, soybean and fermented soybean foods, pepper and fermented pepper foods) were purchased from the six major cities in Korea and analyzed by ELISA-LC/MS/MS system. Twenty two (5.8%; peanut: 11, pistachio: 2, walnut: 6, almond: 1, pepper powder: 1, pepper paste: 1) out of 378 samples were screened as aflatoxin B1 positive by ELISA, but, 4 (1.1%; peanut: 2, pistachio:1, pepper powder: 1) out of the 22 samples screened were confirmed as aflatoxins positive at levels of 1.02~52.79 ng/g by LC/MS/MS. ELISA-LC/MS/MS system provides a more rapid, accurate and cost-effective method for the detection of aflatoxins in large number of samples.