Use of gel permeation chromatography for automatic and rapid extract clean-up for the determination of diarrhetic shellfish toxins (DSP) by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry

Summary A new analytical technique was established to improve the performance of DSP toxin determination in different sample matrices. High performance size exclusion chromatography (gel permeation chromatography, SEC) was applied for the clean-up of raw extracts from algal cells and mussel tissue prior to the determination of DSP toxins by LC/MS. The proposed protocol can be performed totally automatically and enables fast and sensitive analysis of large sample numbers. The recovery of the entire method protocol (consisting of extraction, clean-up and LC/MS determination) was approximately 70% with good repeatability (standard deviation ranging from 1.9% to 5.0% in the concentration range analyzed).