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Mycotoxins are secondary metabolites produced by few fungal
species that readily colonize crops and contaminate them with
toxins in the field or after harvest. Surveillance studies have
showed that mycotoxin contamination is a world-wide problem,
since it is estimated that 25% of the world's crop production and
20% of crop production within the European Union may be
contaminated with these contaminants. Economic losses deriving
from that are tremendous, including reduction of livestock
production and agricultural production, health care, veterinary
and regulatory costs.
The methods described in this Thesis for the extraction of
mycotoxins from cereal and derivates used conventional techniques
such as solid-liquid extraction (SLE), solid-phase extraction
(SPE) and immunoaffinity columns (IACs). However, matrix
solid-phase dispersion (MSPD) and modified QuEChERS were used as
alternative extraction methods.
Finally, and after appropriate extraction method, mycotoxins into
the extract have to be identified and quantified. A method of
analysis for mycotoxins in food should be simple, rapid, robust,
accurate and selective to enable simultaneous determination of
mycotoxins. The currently used quantitative methods for the
determination of mycotoxins in food mainly use chromatographic
techniques for separation, in combination of a variety of
detectors. HPLC with different detectors is frequently used both
for routine analyses and as confirmatory method or screening
techniques.
Nowadays, the most widely used spectrometer in mycotoxins
analysis has been the triple quadrupole, although QTRAP and
Orbitrap technology were used in this Thesis in order to improve
qualitative data.
At the end, the regular presence of low levels of mycotoxins in
several foods has been clearly demonstrated. Therefore,
estimation of risk in terms of daily intake was calculated, in
all the cases the daily dietary intake was below the tolerable
daily intake established.
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