Determination of ochratoxin A in food: comparison of a stable isotope dilution assay, liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.

Quantitative results for the mycotoxin ochratoxin A (OTA), obtained by a stable isotope dilution assay (SIDA) were compared with two commonly used analytical methods for OTA quantitation. For this, different types of food, such as wheat, coffee, sultanas, and blood sausages, were analyzed. Because results obtained by the SIDA method were closest to the certified contents of an OTA reference material, data obtained by this method were considered as reference data. For liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection, a clean-up by solid phase extraction on silica was found to be necessary, and a correction for recovery had to be performed to match the data from the SIDA experiments. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) strongly overestimated the OTA content in coffee and nutmeg therefore an extract clean-up by immunoaffinity chromatography had to be used to match the SIDA results. Following this sample preparation, ELISA gave correct qualitative and semiquantitative results, and proved to be a suitable screening method. SIDA was also established as a valuable tool to quantify OTA in meat products, when using a clean-up procedure developed recently for blood samples.