Novel and rapid methods for histamine quantification in wine and culture medium

Abstract

Fermented beverages are frequently contaminated with histamine, produced by lactic acid bacteria exhibiting histidine decarboxylase activity. In wine, presence of histamine is associated with a lack of hygiene during the winemaking process. Determination of histamine is of great importance because it can be toxic to humans. Therefore, two rapid, inexpensive and simple methods were developed to determine histamine in wine and culture medium and the samples did not require complicated extraction procedures. The new colorimetric method showed a good correlation between absorbance and histamine concentration in the interval of 1.0 ? 100 mg/L of histamine in wine and Moeller culture broth samples (R2 = 0.9981 and 0.9941, respectively). Thin layer chromatography (nTLC) with a new visualization reagent also demonstrated a good correlation between histamine concentrations between 5.0 and 100 mg/L and absorbance with an R2 of 0.9882 and 0.9839 for wine and Moeller culture broth samples, respectively. Both methods showed a high correlation with ELISA (R2 = 0.9972 and 0.9968, respectively) and also exhibited good histamine recovery (higher than 87%). The detection limit of the two new methods was comparable with existing analytical methods. Both methods seem to be suitable for routine analysis to monitor histamine in any research and wine quality control laboratory.