Aflatoxin determination in saffron by high-performance liquid chromatography and immunoaffinity column clean-up

In this paper, method based on high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection has been suggested to measure aflatoxin in saffron. This method required a simple extraction of aflatoxin using MeOH/H2O (80:20, v/v) and a purification by immunoaffinity column cleanup. Aflatoxin measurement was performed at an emission wavelength of 445 nm and an excitation wavelength of 365 nm. Detection limits for AFB1, AFB2, AFG1 and AFG2 were 0.293, 0.08, 0.55, and 0.30 ng g-1, respectively. The percentage of Relative standard deviations for measuring aflatoxin is in the range of 1.33-5.10 % and the percentage of recovery is in the range of 94-67. Regarding The overall results of high-performance liquid chromatography applied in this experiment, we can realize that this method can be used for detection and measurement of different kinds of aflatoxins in saffron.