Abstract
ABSTRACT For time immemorial, Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) have been widely used in China for disease treatment and promotion of general well-being. However, in recent years, many studies have shown that mycotoxins produced by fungi could contaminate CHMs due to unfavourable pre- or post-harvest conditions, raising major concern for consumer safety. At present, there is a significant focus on developing novel mycotoxin detection methods for analysing CHMs, and numerous studies have aimed to determine which kinds of raw herbal materials are most susceptible to mycotoxin contamination. In this review, we focus on recent advances in understanding and detection of mycotoxins in domestic raw herbal materials and related products from 2000 to 2018. Aspects of mycotoxin contamination of CHMs covered in this review include common mycotoxin contaminants in CHMs, maximum mycotoxin residue limits, analytical methods for mycotoxin detection and their applications and limitations, as well as a brief discussion of the trends in ongoing research.
Highlights
Mycotoxins are secondary metabolites produced by fungi during growth that can cause pathological responses in humans and animals
We summarised some common mycotoxin contaminants found in medicinal materials and discussed methods for their detection
Another complication in collecting accurate data lies in that the rapid detection methods such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and gold immunochromatographic assay (GICA) are more prone to false negatives or false positives than conventional detection methods
Summary
Mycotoxins are secondary metabolites produced by fungi during growth that can cause pathological responses in humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that these mycotoxins are highly toxic resulting in hepatotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, reproductive disorders, and immuno-suppression. These mycotoxins are carcinogenic, teratogenic, and mutagenic making exposure to compounds of this nature a serious human health threat. AFs are secondary metabolites that share a common difurocoumarin skeleton; they are produced by Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus (Shen et al 2016). This class of compounds includes aflatoxin B1, B2, G1, G2, M1, and M2; of these, AFB1 is the most toxic and carcinogenic one. Exposure to AFB1 resulted in liver cancer and even death (Ma and Zan 2009)
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