Humans are constantly exposed to a wide spectrum of foreign substances from the dietary sources or the environment. Mycotoxins belong among the major group of such compounds that pose a significant health risk, particularly when considering chronic effects. To assess the human exposure to mycotoxins, biomarker-based approaches have proven to be important tools, where low concentration levels, complex matrix compositions, structurally diverse analytes, and the large size of sample cohorts are the main challenges of analytical procedures. To achieve sufficiently low limits of quantification, various pre-concentration tools, like solid phase extraction (SPE) or immunoaffinity columns (IAC), are usually used in majority of the currently published methods. However, limitations in number of mycotoxins per analysis, cost and sample throughput are a consequence of such approaches. The aim of this presentation is to introduce a sensitive high-throughput multi-mycotoxin method based on urine purification by the two-phase liquid system (the principle of QuEChERS procedure), followed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (Q-orbitrap Exploris 230, Thermo Scientific), where the selectivity of the detection compensates presence of some residual co-extracts. Exploiting of various acquisition modes, using specific fragmentation followed by collecting the highly resolved full spectral data, will be demonstrated. Potential of such multi-method when compared with traditional approaches will be critically assessed.
