Ergot alkaloids cloud point extraction and separation by capillary electrophoresis applied for cereal products

CHIEN CHUN WANG; FERNANDEZ, LILIANA; GOMEZ, MARÍA ROXANA

Simposio; 18th Latin American Symposium on Biotechnology, Biomedical, Biopharmaceutical and Industrial Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis and Microchip Technology; 2012

Ergot alkaloids (EAs) are mycotoxins produced by fungi of the genus Claviceps which are undesirable contaminants in cereal products. These alkaloids are derived from a tetracyclic ergoline whose skeleton is contained in all alkaloids produced by the sclerotium (or ergot) of Claviseps ssp. The sclerotia are harvested with grain, seed or grass and may result in EAs contamination of cereal products and feedstuffs causing ergot poisoning (known as ergotism) in humans and animals (1). In Argentina, no regulatory laws have been applied to control EAs in cereal products for human and animal feeding. But recently, there is an increasing concern about ergot contamination in regional agricultural products, as their negative economic impacts on livestock. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has proved to be effective in separating vegetal metabolic derivatives in several researches. Nevertheless, the exhaustive sample preconcentration and clean-up step required for determination of toxins such as EAs, makes necessary the development of a simple and effective sample pretreatment. For this purpose, cloud point extraction (CPE) has shown to be useful to preconcentrate organic molecules, using a small amount of non-toxic and environmental friendly reagents. In this work, the traditional liquid-liquid partitioning process using a large amount of toxic and highly pollutant organic solvents to extract EAs before CE or HPLC analysis was replaced by CPE procedure. With 10 mM of β-cyclodextrin in run buffer, the EAs have been individually separated. This methodology has been applied for determination of total EAs in cereal products such as flours (rye, wheat, oats, corn, rice and soy), grains (wheat and oat) and a cereal based product for infant feeding, expressed as ergotamine.