Abstract
Due to global warming, the risk of aflatoxins exposure through the consumption of contaminated food has increased. Aflatoxins pose serious health hazards to humans’ and animals’ health because of their carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic properties and their immunosuppressive effects. Aflatoxin contamination in various agricultural commodities has attracted much attention worldwide. Date palm fruits are among these important commodities that are vulnerable to fungal contamination and consequent aflatoxins production. Furthermore, dates are often consumed directly without any further processing, which may result in direct exposure to aflatoxins. Moreover, dates are the second dried fruits traded worldwide, which reflects the widespread consumption of dates due to their nutritive values in addition to religious and cultural values. Accordingly, this review summarizes and discusses the frequency and incidence of aflatoxin contamination in dates worldwide and outlines the analytical procedure for aflatoxin determination in dates for the first time. The susceptibility of date palm fruits to aflatoxins contamination has been documented at various levels in several regions. The findings urged the importance of conducting more comprehensive studies on aflatoxin occurrence and contamination levels in dates as a likely contributor to the dietary exposure to aflatoxins.
Highlights
Food security and the potential effects of global warming on crops have become crucial aspects worldwide [1]
An electronic search was conducted in major databases including Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar using “Aflatoxin ∗ AND Dried fruits”, “Aflatoxin ∗ AND Date fruits”, Aflatoxin ∗ AND Date Palm and “Mycotoxin ∗ AND Dried fruits” as keywords. e databases were screened for the period between 2010 and 2019 with English language. e electronic search identified 170 articles, of which 14 were found to be eligible for inclusion. e publications were evaluated through the title, abstract, and full text of papers to ensure that these studies covered levels of aflatoxins contamination in dates (Figure 3)
Analytical Procedure for Aflatoxins Determination in Date Palm Fruits. e general trend in aflatoxins analysis is the performance of total aflatoxins (AFB1, aflatoxin B2 (AFB2), aflatoxin G1 (AFG1), and aflatoxin G2 (AFG2)) methods, which allow the analysis of a wide range of aflatoxins in a single run, using liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry/mass (LC-MS/MS) technique [30–34]
Summary
Food security and the potential effects of global warming on crops have become crucial aspects worldwide [1]. Global warming has increased the risk of mycotoxin exposure as the Earth’s temperature has increased; water evaporation from the Earth’s surface has increased as well, resulting in escalating humidity and spreading the risk of mycotoxigenic Aspergillus species. These climatic changes have increased the production of mycotoxins, such as aflatoxins, which are among the most hazardous mycotoxins [2, 3]. More than 20 forms of aflatoxins exist. A recent risk assessment of aflatoxins in food published by the European
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