**4. Conclusions**

Despite LFIAs still being regarded in some ways as an emerging and incoming technology for food safety monitoring, there are several examples of fully developed devices described in the literature and also available as commercial kits for detecting a variety of natural and xenobi‐ otic contaminants. Annual updates of state-of-the-art techniques underline the growing inter‐ est in the field and the increasing relevance of this technology over more established screening techniques. Not with standing the research is conditioned by the attainment of effectively functioning devices, often at the expense of true innovation, except in a few rare cases.

The literature concerning lateral flow immunoassays for aflatoxins is stilllimited, partly be‐ cause the subject is very recent; indeed, the first published work on this topic dates back to just adecade ago. From this pioneering approach, several papers have been published which describes devices mainly aimed at measuring aflatoxin B1. The use of LFDs for aflatoxin de‐ termination in nuts has also been demonstrated, even if the principal application is repre‐ sented by their use to monitor aflatoxin contamination in cereals and derived products. This can be explained by the fact that research in this field is strongly driven by industry and by the prevalent economic impact of cereals in comparison to other commodities potentially af‐ fected by aflatoxin contamination.

The development of reliable devices for AFM1 detection, conversely, suffers the extreme sen‐ sitivity required to analytical methods aimed at measuring such a contaminant. Very few papers have been published which describe LFIAs for AFM1and none actually meet those requirements, despite the high interest in obtaining adequate systems for the rapid and on site monitoring of this toxin.

In this paper, we demonstrated that modifying the format of the classic lateral flow assay (such as tailoring the toxin conjugate, used as the competitor in the T-line, and the anti‐ body labelling procedure)a greatdetect ability improvement could be obtained. The estimat‐ ed LOD of the developed semi-quantitative LFIA was one order of magnitude lower than previously published LFIAs for AFM1, therefore allowed us to effectively discriminate be‐ tween compliant and noncompliant samples at a level required by the most severe legisla‐ tion in force. Matrix-matched calibration was necessary to level results obtained on milk samples, however, various matrices (undergone to different thermal treatment and with differing fat contents) could be analysed after a very rapid and easy sample treatment, which involves 2' centrifugation followed by the addition of a small volume of a concentrated solution of a surfactant.
