Efficient and reliable food analysis

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The ability to check meats for hormone and antibiotic traces is essential to food safety. One specialist outlines its selection of kits for rapid and accurate detection.

Biacore International AB

Animals used for food production are often treated with antibiotics and hormones for therapeutic purposes and growth promotion, and humans can subsequently consume these. Consumption of contaminated foodstuffs may result in acute food poisoning, allergic reactions or the development of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms.

Consequently, regulatory authorities closely control the level of drug residues entering the human food chain. Live animals and resultant foodstuffs must be rapidly tested using detection methods with a high degree of sensitivity, to ensure contamination levels do not exceed specified legal limits. Biacore offers a reliable method for the detection of veterinary drug residues, with kits specifically designed to measure levels of contaminants such as beta-agonists, sulphonamides, streptomycin and chloramphenicol.

Beta-agonists

Beta-adrenergic agonists (beta-agonists) are synthetic compounds used therapeutically in human and veterinary medicine. Beta-agonists are orally active and when fed at around ten times the therapeutic dose, they are also effective growth promoters, increasing protein deposition and decreasing fat mass. The economic benefits of this practice can be enormous but it can give rise to the presence of toxic residues in meat.

Within the EU, beta-agonist drugs have been banned for use as growth promoters. This restriction is not been applied globally, however, which has repercussions for the import of meat products into the EU. Screening methods for individual beta-agonists have been developed and marketed as commercial kits. These are mostly immunoassay-based, including ELISA and RIA. Chromatographic techniques such as HPTLC, HPLC, GC-MS and LC-MS are also used, but may involve long, cumbersome extraction procedures or derivatisation, or may lack sensitivity.

Biacore assays have been developed for the screening of beta-agonist residues. Qflex Kit ® Clenbuterol and Qflex kit Ractopamine is used for detection of these residues at low part per billion (ppb) levels. In support of these two kits, assay developments have led to a generic, multi-beta-agonist screening test where at least 14 members of the beta-agonist family can be detected in liver from cattle, sheep and pigs.

Chloramphenicol

Chloramphenicol is a broad-spectrum antibiotic with excellent antibacterial and pharmacokinetic properties. In human medicine, however, its use is often associated with the development of aplastic anaemia, a rare but serious blood disorder. It has therefore been banned from use in food-producing animals, including honey bees, in the EU, USA, Canada and many other countries.

As a prohibited substance, zero tolerance applies. Methods of detection therefore require very low detection limits and with the introduction of increased testing, high sample throughput is also an important factor.

Conventional methods of detection include MBA, immunoassays, chromatography and mass spectrometry. Some of these lack the necessary sensitivity, while others require long sample preparation. A provisional limit of detection of 0.3 ppb was suggested as required detection sensitivity, but many food companies introduced their own action limits, forcing the development of ultra-sensitive assays, able to detect to <0.1 ppb.

The validated protocols used with Biacore ®Q analysis instrument and Qflex Kit Chloramphenicol provides rapid, sensitive and reliable automated detection of chloramphenicol residues in poultry muscle, honey, milk and shellfish (see Table 1).

Table 1. Limits of detection and within/between run assay precisions for the analysis of chloramphenicol in milk, poultry muscle, honey and shellfish

Further information

Biacore International AB

Tel: +46 18 675700
Fax: +46 18 150110

Email: norden@biacore.com

Website: www.biacore.com

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