Rapid, non-destructive selection of peanuts for high aflatoxin content by soaking and tandem mass spectrometry

Peanut lots are subject to aflatoxin levels high enough to cause concern to health agencies and trade channels. A possible solution would be to mechanically sort out high aflatoxin nuts from the process stream. Only highly contaminated nuts would need to be removed. However, there exists at present no sorting mechanism which meets commercial needs of adequate reduction and product preservation. To build such a sorter requires knowledge of the properties that can be used for sorting. The first step in the design is to select on the order of one hundred undamaged contaminated nuts which can be compared with noncontaminated ones. Because contaminated nuts are rare, a very large number of nuts needs to be examined nondestructively. We present a method to rapidly carry out such a selection. The method is based on dipping nuts into extraction fluid and examining the resulting fluid by tandem MS without preliminary cleanup. This method has been applied to examine over 65,000 nuts, yielding approximately 120 nuts, each containing more than 250-43000 ng/g aflatoxin (depending on process stream).