Abstract
Mycotoxins are considered one of the most dangerous agricultural and food contaminants. They are toxic and the development of rapid and sensitive analytical methods to detect and quantify them is a very important issue in the context of food safety and animal/human health. The need to detect mycotoxins at trace levels and to simultaneously analyze many different mycotoxin types became mandatory to protect public health. In fact, European Commission regulations specified both their limits in foodstuffs and official sample preparation protocols in addition to analytical methods to verify their presence. Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) includes different separation modes, allowing many versatile applications in food analysis and safety. In the context of mycotoxins, recent advances to improve CE sensitivity, particularly pre-concentration techniques or miniaturized systems, deserve remarkable attention, as they provide an interesting approach in the analysis of such contaminants in complex food matrices. This review summarizes the applications of CE combined with different pre-concentration approaches, which have been proposed in the literature (mainly) in the last ten years. A section is also dedicated to recent microchip–CE devices since they represent the most promising CE mode for this application.
Highlights
Mycotoxins are natural secondary metabolites produced by filamentous fungi (Aspergillus, Fusarium, and Penicillium)
Solid-Phase Microextraction (SPME) is suitable for low-volume applications [52,53]. Developments in automation, such as new autosamplers, and high-throughput analyses of fibre-SPME setups allowed researchers to increase the speed of sample preparation and injection procedures, allowing them to be applied in routine analysis [52]
The SPME procedure coupled with Molecularly Imprinted Polymers (MIPs) is named Molecularly Imprinted Solid-Phase Microextraction (MISPME) and represents a very promising and versatile technique, whose different formats and coatings ensured a wide range of applications, including food analysis [54]
Summary
Mycotoxins are natural secondary metabolites produced by filamentous fungi (Aspergillus, Fusarium, and Penicillium). Each CE mode exploits a simple modification of CZE BGE (by adding organic solvents for CEC and NACE or surfactants for MEKC) and different basic principles (mobility, hydrophobic/ionic interactions, etc.) [35,36] This ensures a wide range of applications in the analysis of food-related molecules: amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, DNA, vitamins, and different contaminants (metals, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, drugs, and mycotoxins) [35,36]. Nowadays, recent advances in the CE application techniques the same sensitivity levels as HPLC improvements,of chromatography still represents the elective technique to Despite analyze mycotoxins, but a allowing the application this technique for routine monitoring These improvements, CE overview of its recent advances in this topic is necessary to underline CE potentialities.
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