Determination of cyclopiazonic acid in white mould cheese by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) using a novel internal standard

For the determination of cyclopiazonic acid (CPA) in food and feed samples a simple and accurate LC-MS/MS method, which does not require extensive sample clean-up steps, was developed and validated. A fully carbon-13-labelled internal standard was used to compensate for matrix effects. Briefly, the samples were extracted with 1% formic acid in acetonitrile and directly analysed with HPLC-MS/MS. The following MS/MS transitions were used: m/z 337/196 and 337/182 for cyclopiazonic acid; m/z 357/210 and 357/191 for (13)C20-cyclopiazonic acid. Applying this optimised method, LODs down to 0.2μgkg(-1) and LOQs down to 0.5μgkg(-1) were determined in the validated matrices. The focus of this study was testing different types of white mould cheese but other complex samples could also be analyzed successfully with this method. It was interesting to find out, that in some commercially available white mould cheese, high concentrations of CPA (up to 3700μgkg(-1)) could be found.