Evaluation of commercial maize cultivars for their resistance to aflatoxigenic fungi under storage conditions in Ethiopia

Abstract

A seed system can be defined as all activities related to seed production, seed storage, seed management, seed dissemination, and seed use. The aim of the study was to evaluate commercial maize cultivars for their resistance to aflatoxigenic fungi under storage conditions in Ethiopia. The collected samples were analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA, SAS version: 9.4) and the mean differences were separated by a t-test (LSD). There was a significantly different (p< 0.05) storage fungi incidence in the commercial maize cultivars and the highest incidence of 30.00 and 30.33% of A. flavus and A. Niger was recorded in BH661 and BH546, respectively. There were significantly different (p< 0.05) variations in the germination percentage of the maize cultivars throughout the locations. The highest germination, 97.33 %, was obtained from the Jibat cultivar whereas the lowest, 72.67 %, was recorded in BH546. In all the five commercial maize cultivars analyzed, aflatoxin types were not detected and quantified because it was below the quantification limits of 0.35 μg/kg and the development of secondary metabolite was low due to limited development of the factors that aggravated it in the seed’s storage. This study showed storage periods have a low effect on the development of Mycotoxins/secondary metabolites on the seeds of commercial maize cultivars since the samples were taken from seeds stored for more than one to three years but no aflatoxin types were detected. Therefore, from this study, it was concluded that seed storage has less impact on the aflatoxin types&#39; development but has a high impact on seed germination.