Exploiting second-order advantage using PARAFAC2 for fast HPLC-DAD quantification of mixture of aflatoxins in pistachio nuts

A new methodology using second-order calibration based on PARAllel FACtor analysis 2 (PARAFAC2) is developed for fast quantification of aflatoxins B1, B2, G1 and G2 in pistachio samples by liquid chromatography with diode array detection (LC-DAD). Solvent and solid phase extractions were used for sample preparation steps. In this work, a gradient elution programme was optimised to make co-elutions between analytes and also to shorten the analysis time. Prediction was made on synthetic and real validation samples with a mixture calibration design. Special circumstances such as overlapping of analytes, the lack of spectral selectivity and also the lack of trilinearity, have been compensated with “mathematic separation” through PARAFAC2 modelling. The results showed an acceptable performance of PARAFAC2 for resolution and quantification of all analytes in a single array exploiting the second-order advantage. With the proposed method, the chromatographic run time and also the time for data analysis were reduced significantly.