The effects of the extrusion process used for the production of maize snacks and pasta on the free, bound, and total B fumonisin contents

Abstract

Mechanical and thermal treatments promote chemical changes in B fumonisins (FBs), mycotoxins that frequently contaminate maize. These changes, in turn, lead to the production of chemically modified or matrix-associated FBs, the so-called “bound” FBs, at the expense of the free forms. The present study has been aimed at evaluating the effects of the maize composition and the technological processes of co-extrusion, used for snack production and pasta-making, on the free and total FB contents, which were released after alkaline hydrolysis, by means of an LC-MS/MS analysis of the hydrolyzed FBs, estimating by difference the content of the bound FBs. Overall, the total content of FBs was always higher (1.1–2.3 times) than the free one, and higher values of bound FBs (2.6–4.3 times) were always reached for the maize-based products than the raw materials, thus confirming that processing promotes the binding of a part of the free FBs to the matrix. The obtained results confirm that the ‘masking’ phenomenon, which takes place through a matrix-association, is predominant during food processing, and is higher in pasta-making compared to co-extrusion for snack production. Moreover, results to increase in higher particle size flours than finer ones, while no clear effects are related to the starch composition.