Acta Chimica Slovaca (ACS) publishes papers on fundamental and applied aspects of chemistry, biochemistry, chemical technology, chemical engineering and process control, biotechnology and food technology. Welcome are also topics which include chemical aspects of materials, physical chemistry and chemical physics, analytical chemistry, macromolecular chemistry and biomedical engineering.

Aflatoxin M1 in cheese: situation on the Slovak market

Lukáš Kolarič *, Emma Vinohradská, Peter Šimko

Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology, Institute of Food Science and Nutrition, Department of Food Technology, Radlinského 9, 812 37 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

E-mail: * lukas.kolaric@stuba.sk

Abstract: Aflatoxin M1 (AFM1), which is a hydroxylated metabolite of aflatoxin B1, can be irreversibly bound to casein micelles and therefore be present in cheese at higher content than in the original milk. The present study describes the validation of a reliable and rapid method for the determination of AFM1 content in cheese with the application on 36 kinds of cheese sold in Slovakia during the spring of 2024. The method consisted of three basic steps: extraction of AFM1 from cheese, purification of extracts using immunoaffinity columns, and determination of AFM1 content by high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection. The suitability was proved by the limits of detection and quantification equal to 2.0 and 6.0 ng/kg, respectively, which is in accordance with the limits set by European legislation for analytical procedure for AFM1 determination in milk. The accuracy of the method was measured as a recovery test using spiking cheese with AFM1 and varied between 87.8 and 100.5%. The precision was confirmed by low relative standard deviations, 0.3-7.9%, and HorRat values (0.01-0.32) of the results obtained on different days. As followed from the experiments, the AFM1 content in all cheese was noticed to be below the limit of quantification, which approved indirectly the absence of AFM1 in milk as raw material at these times. However, due to global warming it is envisaged increased contamination of milk by AFM1 in the next future, therefore the situation in the milk contamination by AFM1 should be an essential part of current food safety issues.

Keywords: aflatoxin M1, cheese, detection, food control, high performance liquid chromatography, validation

Acta Chimica Slovaca, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2025, pp. 32—40, DOI: 10.2478/acs-2025-0004