## 1 Introduction  
_Alternaria_ toxins are the toxic metabolites of _Alternaria_ species, which are widely distributed fungi in nature, that can act as both plant pathogens and saprophytes that damage agronomic crops during their growth and post-harvest. More than 70 mycotoxins and phytotoxins have been isolated from the _Alternaria_ species [1]. Among them, alternariol (AOH), alternariol monomethyl ether (AME), tenuazonic acid (TeA), tentoxin (TEN), altenuene (ALT), alterotoxins I (ATX-I), and alterotoxins II (ATX-II) have been reported as toxic food contaminants, widely detected in food and feedstuff infected with _Alternaria_ species. The _Alternaria_ species are plant pathogens that are able to spoil cereals, fruits, and vegetables in storage or during transport, even when these are refrigerated. Considerable literature has reported the occurrence of _Alternaria_ toxins in various agricultural products, such as tomatoes and tomato products [2], pomegranate fruits and juices [3], carrots [4], sunflower products [5], cereals [6], citrus-based food [7], wine [8], and dried fruits [9]. As to the analytical procedures, _Alternaria_ toxins are usually extracted via liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) using an organic-water solution (acetonitrile [10], methanol [11], and ethyl acetate [12]) mixed with acetic acid, which is preferable for the extraction of TeA, an acidic compound [10]. However, this procedure is tedious and the large number of required toxic organic solvents is time- and resource-consuming. Given its low consumption of highly toxic organic solvents and the clean-up effort required, solid-phase extraction (SPE) was developed to determine _Alternaria_ toxins using hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB) [7; 13], octadecyl silane (C18) [14; 15], aminopropyl [16], and polystyrene-divinylbenzene copolymer (PS-DVB) SPE cartridge [17]. Nevertheless, SPE procedures include activation, elution, and evaporation steps, which is labor-intensive to some extent. To avoid these drawbacks, some efficient and miniaturized sample pretreatment methods were developed by a number of analysts. [PERSON] et al. [18] proposed a novel pretreatment method, ionic liquid modified countercurrent chromatography to extract AOH, AME, and TeA from wine and juice. [PERSON] et al. [19] developed the dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) coupled to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for the monitoring of AOH, AME, and ALT in tomatoes. From a practical point of view, the application of these novel methods is limited to the sample matrix and types of _Alternaria_ toxins. In 2003, [PERSON] [20] first introduced the QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe) method for pesticide analysis in fruits and vegetables, in which sorbents were added into sample solutions directly without the use of SPE columns. Because of its simplicity, efficacy, and adaptability to multiresidue analysis, QuEChERS was successively adopted as the standard pretreatment method in Association of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC) Official Method 2007.01 [21] and British Standard and European Standard Norme (BS EN) 15662:2008 [22]. The applications of this method have expanded to pesticides, veterinary drugs, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and mycotoxins in a wide variety of matrices [23], which also include the detection of _Alternaria_ toxins in tomato products [24], vegetable juices [25], pomegranate fruits and juices [3], cereals [26], cereal-based foodstuffs [6], citrus [27], barley [28; 29], soya beans [30], and animal feed [31]. However, the extraction of _Alternaria_ toxins from juube has not been studied to date. Because of the unique composition of sugar, water, and the nutrient content during growth and post-harvest, juube is susceptible to infection by fungi and even encourages fungal growth [32].