Researchers Develop Novel Nontargeted Screening Method for Animal-derived Food Safety
Animal-derived food is one of the major food types. Nontargeted screening of both veterinary drugs and their metabolites is important for comprehensive safety evaluation of animal-derived foods.
Recently, a research group led by Prof. XU Guowang from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) developed a novel nontargeted screening method for risk substances in food.
This study was published in Food Chemistry on August 21.
Nontargeted screening method for veterinary drugs and their metabolites developed based on fragmentation characteristics from ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography-high-resolution mass spectrometry (Image by LIANG Wenying)
The researchers constructed an in-house mass spectra database containing 3710 veterinary drugs and their metabolites, and summarized the fragmentation characteristics of parent drugs and drug metabolites. Then, they developed nontargeted screening method to discover known and unknown veterinary drugs and their metabolites in complex food matrices.
Moreover, they determined and identified four veterinary drugs and three drug metabolites in the egg samples with this novel nontargeted screening method, which demonstrated its potential in risk substance screening for food safety.
"This study provides an important method for the discovery of food risk substances," said Prof. XU.
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Innovation Program of Science and Research from DICP. (Text by LIANG Wenying)
