A novel Magnetic Molecularly imprinted polymer for detection of mycotoxin from bread sample

Based on molecular imprinting and nanotechnology, a molecular imprinted polymer (MIP) coupled with Fe3O4-Au nanocomposite adsorbent has been successfully developed for rapid quantification of aflatoxin B1 in foodstuff. The characterization of the prepared Fe3O4-Au and Fe3O4-Au-MIP was studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). The adsorption capacity was 8.975 mg g-1 which revealed that the synthesized MMIP presented high selective recognition property to AFB1. The selectivity adsorption experiments indicated that compared with three different competitive Aflatoxins, MMIP showed excellent affinity to AFB1. The proposed method was successfully applied to the estimation of AFB1 in bread samples with good recoveries. Also, the relative standard deviation (RSD %) values were lower than 3.7%. The selectivity, stability and reproducibility of the proposed method were acceptable. The results revealed that Fe3O4-Au@MIP could be used as an efficient and reusable adsorbent for AFB1 in food samples. This study provides a simple, inexpensive, fast, accurate and environmentally-friendly technique instead of expensive and time-consuming procedures for determining AFB1 in food matrices.