Abstract
Fumonisins are major mycotoxins found worldwide in maize and maize products. Because of their toxicity for both human and animals, European Union regulations were created to fix the maximal fumonisin B1 and B2 content allowed in foods and feeds. Unfortunately, directly measuring these mycotoxins by current analytical techniques is tedious and expensive and most measurement methods do not lend themselves to online control. Alternative approaches to chemical analysis have been developed and involve models that allow the mycotoxin contamination to be predicted based on environmental conditions and analysis by near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. In the present work, we use NIR spectroscopy to determine the fumonisin and fungal contents of 117 samples of maize. The determination coefficient between fumonisin and fungal-biomass content was 0.44. We establish herein a threshold for the number of CFUs for fungal biomass beyond which the fumonisin content is likely to exceed the European regulatory level of 4000 μg/kg. In addition, we determine the fungal content by using a NIR-spectroscopy model that allows us to sort samples of maize. Upon calibration, the percentage of well-classified samples was 96%, which compares favorably to the 82% obtained by independent verification.
Highlights
Fumonisins are the main mycotoxins produced by the fungi Fusarium verticillioides and F. proliferatum, which are found worldwide as contaminants of maize and maize byproducts [1].Fumonisin B1, the most toxic compound of the family, is suspected to be related to the increase in esophageal cancers in some areas (e.g., China and South Africa) [2, 3] and to the rising rate of neural tube defects reported in North and Central America [4, 5]
The maize samples were mainly contaminated with fungal species belonging to the Fusarium genus, which were found in 97% of the maize samples
The last step of this work, which we present involves using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to rapidly predict the colony-forming units (CFUs) content of maize samples
Summary
Fumonisin B1, the most toxic compound of the family, is suspected to be related to the increase in esophageal cancers in some areas (e.g., China and South Africa) [2, 3] and to the rising rate of neural tube defects reported in North and Central America [4, 5] This compound is hepatic and nephrotoxic in many animal species [6]. The most commonly used methods to determine fumonisin contamination are based on highperformance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with fluorescence detection and/or mass spectrometry and/or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays [9]. These methods depend directly on how representative the sample is of the overall batch of feed or food. Mycotoxin contamination is generally heterogeneous, and characterizing an entire batch of several tons of maize would require preparing many subsamples to form a representative sample
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