Occurrence of fumonisin B1 in Bulgarian maize samples determined by ELISA and TLC methods using different clean up steps.

An enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) method and a thin-layer chromatography (TLC) method with two different clean-up procedures have been used to analyse maize samples (food and feeding stuff) obtained from Bulgaria. The occurrence of Fumonisin B1 in Bulgarian maize was found to be in the range of what was reported for other European regions with a mean value of 1.5 mg/kg, 2.1 mg/kg and 1.8 mg/kg when analysed by ELISA and thin-layer chromatography with solid phase extraction clean up and immunoaffinity clean up, respectively. It was shown that results of the different methods are comparable, indicating that the methods applied are sufficiently reliable tools for the simple and rapid screening of maize samples.