Rapid, efficient, and accurate determination of aflatoxins and capsaicinoids in vegetable oils by immunomagnetic sorbents coupled with UHPLC–MS/MS

Abstract

A fast, simple, and sensitive analytic method was proposed for the simultaneous quantification of aflatoxins (AFTs) and capsaicinoids in vegetable oils by immunomagnetic sorbent coupled with ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry. The immunomagnetic solid phase extraction (IMSPE) sorbents were synthesized with the monoclonal antibodies via cyanogen bromide magnetic sorbents, which could modify the surface magnetic sorbents under mild synthetic condition. The IMSPE procedure had the following aspects such as ease manipulation, easy disperse, quick isolation, eco-friendly, and cost-effective. The major conditions of IMSPE procedure were systemically studied, and the optimized pretreatment was accomplished in 15 min avoding complicated condition or sophisticated equipment. Excellent linearities were achieved by the correlation (R²) more than 0.9983. The limits of quantifications of all analytes ranged from 0.03 to 0.20 µg kg⁻¹, and the recoveries were satisfactory ranging from 75.7% to 124.0% with the intra-day and inter-day precisions less than 10.1%. Additionally, the proposed method was used to analyze AFTs and capsaicinoids in retail oil samples. Overall, 25% of soybean and peanut oils and 12.5% of corn and blended oil were detected with AFTs, and no capsaicinoid was found. The content of AFTs was under the MRLs set by EU and China regulation for food quality and safety. The validated results indicated that this method could be utilized for a rapid, efficient, and accurate quantification of AFTs and capsaicinoids in complex lipid-based matrix.