Aflatoxin Measurement and Analysis

Aflatoxin is a group of secondary metabolites produced by fungi Aspergillus species, such as A. flavus and A. parasiticus; in particular, A. flavus is common in agriculture. A. bombycis, A. ochraceoroseus, A. nomius, and A. pseudotamari are also aflatoxin-producing species, but they are encountered much less frequently (Bennett and Klich, 2003). Aflatoxin contamination can be occurred very widely. They can be found in over a hundred kinds of agro-products and foods,such as peanut, corn, rice, soy sauce, vinegar, plant oil, pistachio, tea, Chinese medicinal herb, egg, milk, feed etc,. Also some of them in animal organism can be detected. Besides these, aflatoxin can spread and accumulated in environment, for example, river and agricultural field. Aflatoxins are highly toxic, mutagenic, teratogenic, and carcinogenic compounds, a group of difuranocoumarin derivatives, consisted of a coumarin and a double-furan-ring of molecule usually. Aflatoxin B1, for example, its toxicity is ten times of potassium cyanide, 68 times of arsenic and 416 times of melamine. Furthermore, their carcinogenicity is over 70 times than that of dimethylnitrosamine and 10000 times of Benzene Hexachloride (BHC). And International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization (WHO) accepted that aflatoxin should be classified as a Group 1 carcinogen in 1987, and then AFB1 is classified as Group 1 (carcinogenic to humans) by the WHO– IARC in 1993 (Li, Zhang & Zhang, 2009). According to the nearest researches by University of Pittsburgh, aflatoxin may play a causative role in 4.6–28.2% of all global HCC cases (Liu and Wu, 2010). To protect agricultural environment, estimate quality of commercials of agro-products and food, and safeguard safety of consumers’ health and lives, over seventy countries setup maximum limits in agro-products, and analytical methods for determination of aflatoxin, play a great role for monitoring and estimation of the contaminants. There are a variety of well established methodologies reported for analysing aflatoxins in many different foodstuffs, such as thin layer chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography, ultra-pressured layer chromatography, immunoaffinity chromatographyhigh-performance liquid chromatography, near infrared spectroscopy and immunoassay