Chinese researchers have developed a new method to improve the screening of hazardous compounds in agricultural products, providing a new strategy for ensuring food safety, according to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS).

Conventional food safety detection methods can only detect one or several types of agricultural and veterinary drugs, and the same sample needs to be analyzed by many different detection methods, which is time-consuming.

Researchers from the Institute of Apicultural Research under the CAAS developed a new integrated data acquisition method based on a high-resolution mass spectrometry platform, which is suitable for high throughput screening of mixed pollutants such as veterinary drugs, pesticides, and mycotoxins in agricultural products.

This method was successfully applied to analyze 180 veterinary drugs in milk, 220 pesticides in tomatoes, and 50 mycotoxins in maize, respectively. Results showed that it achieves a higher rate of identification and lower false results for targeted compounds compared with previous methods.

The method improves the utilization rate of the equipment, avoids repeated data collection, and helps save the screening cost.

The research was published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.