Screening of multi-mycotoxins in fruits by ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled to ion mobility quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry.

Abstract A modified quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe extraction procedure combined with ultra-performance liquid chromatographic separation and ion mobility quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry was developed to determine the presence of 20 mycotoxins (i.e., Alternaria toxins, ochratoxin, patulin, aflatoxin and trichothecenes) in fruit samples from Xinjiang. A complete platform, including screening via an in-house library, confirmation and quantification using reference standards, was established, which provided accurate MS data and complete spectra containing the fragment ions for each analyte. To evaluate the performance of the developed method, satisfactory validation parameters, such as linearity (R2 ≥ 0.9992), precision (RSDs ≤ 9.8%), recovery (81.2–99.2%), LOD (0.06–2.22 µg kg−1), and LOQ (0.2–7.39 µg kg−1), were obtained. The analysis of 130 fruit samples revealed nonnegligible contamination with mycotoxins; specifically, the highest levels of three Alternaria toxins were detected in jujube, wolfberries and raisins.