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

A new analytical technique was established to improve the performance of DS P toxin determination in different sample matrices. High performance size e xclusion chromatography (gel permeation chromatography, SEC) was applied fo r 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 perf ormed totally automatically and enables fast and sensitive analysis of larg e sample numbers. The recovery of the entire method protocol (consisting of extraction, clean-up and LC/MS determination) was approximately 70% with g ood repeatability (standard deviation ranging from 1.9% to 5.0% in the conc entration range analyzed).