Worldwide mycotoxins contamination has a significant impact on animal and human health, and leads to economic losses accounted for billions of dollars annually. Since the application of pre- and post- harvest strategies, including chemical or physical removal, are not sufficiently effective, biological transformation is considered the most promising yet challenging approach to reduce mycotoxins accumulation. Although several microorganisms were reported to degrade mycotoxins, only a few enzymes have been identified, purified and characterized for this activity. This review focuses on the biotransformation of mycotoxins performed with purified enzymes isolated from bacteria, fungi and plants, whose activity was validated in in vitro and in vivo assays, including patented ones and commercial preparations. Furthermore, we will present some applications for detoxifying enzymes in food, feed, biogas and biofuel industries, describing their limitation and potentialities.

Differential gene expression profiling studies have lead to the identification of several disease biomarkers. However, the oncogenic alterations in coding regions can modify the gene functions without affecting their own expression profiles. Moreover, post-translational modifications can modify the activity of the coded protein without altering the expression levels of the coding gene, but eliciting variations to the expression levels of the regulated genes. These considerations motivate the study of the rewiring of networks co-expressed genes as a consequence of the aforementioned alterations in order to complement the informative content of differential expression. We analyzed 339 mRNAomes of five distinct cancer types to find single genes that presented co-expression patterns strongly differentiated between normal and tumor phenotypes. Our analysis of differentially connected genes indicates the loss of connectivity as a common topological trait of cancer networks, and unveils novel candidate cancer genes. Moreover, our integrated approach that combines the differential expression together with the differential connectivity improves the classic enrichment pathway analysis providing novel insights on putative cancer gene biosystems not still fully investigated.

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