A brief intro about the never-ending Mycotoxin contamination issues around the world
The WHO (no, it's not the band)… defines mycotoxins as toxic compounds naturally produced by certain types of fungi. These molds produce mycotoxins, which grow on numerous foodstuffs such as cereals, dried fruits, nuts, and spices. Although only 6 mycotoxins are regulated, this number is expected to rise to 8 soon. The WHO site has it all beautifully explained right here if you're interested in learning more about these toxins.
Increased awareness of mycotoxin contamination in the different food sectors has driven the demand for mitigation strategies, especially in the analytical testing technology. One such example is immunoassays. These technologies have shown to be easy to deploy in the field due to their reduced complexity and versatility, especially in environments where fast decisions need to be made and access to a full-scale laboratory is not feasible.
Now let me dig deeper into what it means not to have access to a full-scale laboratory infrastructure:
Mycotoxin quantitative testing. I've bolded quantitative to emphasize that we all want to know a number- how much toxin is in our food. A favorite weapon of choice in the field is high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). This is because HPLCs offer low limits of quantification, short analysis times, and can analyze several molecules in one shot. Sounds great, yes?
Not quite. Although, I’ve worked with HPLC for many years (FYI: my support for the technique will never go away), it is still a significant capital investment, despite whatever detector it comes with. You'll also need well-trained and skilled personnel who can perform rigorous sample preparation steps (i.e., immunoaffinity purification devices) and, through data, review to avoid misdetection of the compounds of interest.
On the other hand, there are Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) as another common method for quantitatively determining these natural contaminants. ELISA test kits have the advantage of not requiring capital laboratory equipment to be used. They are high throughput assays sensitive enough to work with low sample volumes and often do not require complex sample clean-up protocols compared to HPLC.
The typical downfall of ELISA in mycotoxin analysis is the so-called matrix effects and validation requirements for use with complex matrices (e.g., Distiller's dried grains with solubles "DDGS"), which subsequently leads to the misrepresentation of ELISA as screening methods exclusively.
So this is where working together with my partners ProGnosis Biotech comes in. We look to continuously innovate immunoassay technology by maintaining superior quality production systems to ensure food producers worldwide are reliably quantifying mycotoxins according to the industry's technical needs.
The key to the success of our immunoassay kits is tied hand in hand with the continuous proficiency testing they undergo with direct quantitative performance comparisons with HPLC. And I believe this plays a big role when producers are pressed for critically timed and accurate answers.
More to come on this subject in the following article!
Comments