Mycotoxins: Make your analyses more reliable by using reference material

Mycotoxins are a major problem for global agriculture, with contaminations regularly causing crop losses. Reference materials, as part of quality assurance, are indispensable to reliably detect mycotoxins.

In food analysis, many factors can influence an analytical result, for example the selected method, the extraction process or the solvent used. When analyzing mycotoxins, the inhomogeneous distribution of contaminations and the complex matrices are further issues. Due to these difficulties, it is especially important to control the quality of the analysis. Most laboratories use mycotoxin standards for this. With an increasing number of testing methods and a trend toward lower detection levels, certified reference material presents an even more effective tool for the assessment of the analysis performance. Naturally contaminated materials, containing a defined concentration of mycotoxins, enable comparable and reliable analyses and can be used for many applications, e.g. quality assurance, technician training, calibration of devices and method validation.

An extensive range of reference materials for mycotoxin analysis is available from Trilogy®. The range includes materials based on different matrices (e.g. corn, wheat, barley, oats, animal feed), in various concentrations and for diverse mycotoxins (e.g. aflatoxin, fumonisin, ochratoxin, zearalenone) as well as for multi-mycotoxin analysis.

Further information:

• Quality assurance in the lab
• The 6 biggest challenges in mycotoxin analysis and how to overcome them

More information