Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) is a potent mycotoxin and natural carcinogen. The primary producers of AFB1 are Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus. Sterigmatocystin (STC), another mycotoxin, shares its biosynthetic pathway with aflatoxins. While there are abundant data on the biological effects of AFB1, STC is not well characterised. According to published data, AFB1 is more harmful to biological systems than STC. It has been suggested that STC is about one-tenth as potent a mutagen as AFB1 as measured by the Ames test. In this research, the biological effects of S9 rat liver homogenate-activated and non-activated STC and AFB1 were compared using two different biomonitoring systems, SOS-Chromotest and a recently developed microinjection zebrafish embryo method. When comparing the treatments, activated STC caused the highest mortality and number of DNA strand breaks across all injected volumes. Based on the E. coli SOS-Chromotest, the two toxins exerted the same genotoxicities. Moreover, according to the newly developed zebrafish microinjection method, STC appeared more toxic than AFB1. The scarce information correlating AFB1 and STC toxicity suggests that AFB1 is a more potent genotoxin than STC. Our findings contradict this assumption and illustrate the need for more complex biomonitoring systems for mycotoxin risk assessment.

In routine measurements, the length of the analysis time and nfumber of samples analysed during a time unit are crucial parameters, which are especially important for the food analysis, particularly in the case of mycotoxin determinations. High-resolution equipment, including time-of-flight or Orbitrap analyzators, can provide stable instrumental background for high-throughput analyses. In this report, a short, 1 min MS-based multi-mycotoxin method was developed with the application of a short column as a reduced chromatographic separation, taking advantages of the multiplexing and high-resolution capability of the QExactive Orbitrap MS possessing sub-1 ppm mass accuracy. The performance of the method was evaluated regarding selectivity, LOD, LOQ, linearity, matrix effect, and recovery, and compared to a UHPLC-MS/MS method. The final multiplexing method was able to quantify 11 mycotoxins in defined ranges (aflatoxins (corn, 2.8–600 μg/kg; wheat, 1.5–350 μg/kg), deoxynivalenol (corn, 640–9600 μg/kg; wheat, 128–3500 μg/kg), fumonisins (corn, 20–1500 μg/kg; wheat, 30–3500 μg/kg), HT-2 (corn, 64–5200 μg/kg; wheat, 61–3500 μg/kg), T-2 (corn, 10–800 μg/kg; wheat, 4–250 μg/kg), ochratoxin (corn, 4.7–600 μg/kg; wheat, 1–1000 μg/kg), zearalenone (corn, 64–4800 μg/kg; wheat, 4–500 μg/kg)) within one minute in corn and wheat matrices at the MRL levels stated by the European Union.