2. Getting involved
3. Standards Committees
4. NAL

DIN Standards Committee Food and Agricultural Products

Overview

Fumonisins are water-soluble mycotoxins which can be found worldwide and which are produced by certain plant pathogenic fungi of the genus fusarium, especially on maize. According to the Bibliography, maize flour and maize grits are most severely contaminated. The maximum levels for the fumonisins B₁ and B₂ have been specified for Germany in the Regulation amending the Ordinance on the maximum permissible quantities of mycotoxins in foodstuffs of 2004-02-04. This standard has been prepared by WG 5 "Biotoxins" of CEN/TC 275 "Food analysis - Horizontal methods" in order to be able to uniformly analyse these maximum levels throughout Europe. It specifies a method for the determination of fumonisin B₁ (FB₁) and fumonisin B₂ (FB₂) in processed maize-containing foods for infants and young children by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with immunoaffinity cleanup and fluorescence detection (FLD). This method has been validated in an interlaboratory study via the analysis of both naturally contaminated and spiked samples ranging from 111,6 µg/kg to 458,0 µg/kg for FB₁/FB₂, 89,1 µg/kg to 384,4 µg/kg for FB₁ and 22,5 µg/kg to 73,6 µg/kg for FB₂. Fumonisins are extracted from the sample with a mixture of citrate-phosphate buffer-methanol-acetonitrile. The filtered extract is diluted with water and applied to an immunoaffinity column containing antibody specific to fumonisins. Fumonisins are eluted from the column with methanol and water and quantified by HPLC/FLD with pre-column derivatization with o-phthaldialdehyde (OPA) reagent.

Document: references other documents

Responsible national committee

NA 057-01-03 AA - Biotoxins  

Responsible european committee

CEN/TC 275/WG 5 - Biotoxins