There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
A new and accurate method to quantify ochratoxin A (OA) in table wine has been developed.
The method uses commercial immunoaffinity columns for clean-up and high-performance
liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence detection for quantification of the
toxin. Wine was diluted with a solution containing 1% polyethylene glycol (PEG 8000)
and 5% sodium hydrogencarbonate, filtered and applied to an OchraTest immunoaffinity
column. The column was washed with a solution containing sodium chloride (2.5%) and
sodium hydrogencarbonate (0.5%) followed by water. OA was eluted with methanol and
quantified by reversed-phase HPLC with fluorometric detection (excitation wavelength
333 nm, emission wavelength 460 nm) using acetonitrile-water-acetic acid (99:99:2)
as mobile phase. Average recoveries of OA from white, rosé and red wine samples spiked
at levels from 0.04 to 10 ng/ml ranged from 88% to 103%, with relative standard deviations
(RSDs) between 0.2 and 9.7%. Detection limit was 0.01 ng/ml based on a signal-to-noise
ratio of 3:1. The method was applied successfully to 56 samples of red (38), rosé
(8), white (9) and dessert (1) wine. The levels of OA ranged from <0.01 to 7.6 ng/ml
with red wines more contaminated than rosé and white wines. A good correlation (r=0.987)
was found by comparative analysis of 20 naturally contaminated samples using this
method and the method of Zimmerli and Dick with better recoveries of OA and better
performances for the new method. Several advantages of this method with respect to
the actually available methods have been pointed out, with particular reference to
red wine which appears to be the most difficult to analyze.