FFoQSI 3.2.1 Accelerated Multiclass Analysis

Toxins and contaminants are powerful agents that are a threat to the health of humans and animals throughout the world. Moreover, economic damages due to grains infected with mycotoxin producing fungi amount to annual losses of at least 1.5 billion Euro. Massive research endeavour has increased the capabilities of analytical approaches and FFoQSI partners have met various important milestones in this field. Despite massive investments into research to control and reduce mycotoxins along food and feed chains, there is still a great need to improve techniques to quickly and accurately quantify these toxic secondary metabolites of fungi and to establish new effective ways for their detoxification. By building on the results obtained within the first FFoQSI funding period, we propose to develop a novel high-throughput method based on modifications of the chromatographic as well as of the mass spectrometric parameters.The current approach for the simultaneous determination of natural and anthropogenic contaminants is based on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) with a separate data acquisition in the positive and negative ionization mode, respectively. This requires two injections per sample, resulting in an analysis time of 45 minutes. Therefore, the objectives are to • develop a high-throughput method based on modifications of the chromatographic as well as of the mass spectrometric parameters and subsequently validate it • generate a large data set on the prevalence of mycotoxins and other contaminants in dedicated samples from different geographical regions with a special emphasis on Austria and China and to extract a priority list of emerging contaminants and provide this to the company partners for prioritizing their own research efforts • establish a national monitoring programme for fungal metabolites and plant toxins in wheat and maize grown in Austria (in cooperation with FFoQSI research partner AGES) to pin down the influence of resistant cultivars, climatic parameters and agricultural practices on the prevalence of these contaminants.