Exposure assessment of Portuguese population to multiple mycotoxins: The human biomonitoring approach

Alternaria toxins as casein kinase 2 inhibitors and possible consequences for estrogenicity: a hybrid in silico/in vitro study

“…In a recent study on rats, the systemic bioavailability of AOH and AME was described to be comparably low, with 6-10% of the compounds excreted via the urine, while 87% of the administered AME was found to remain in the feces (Puntscher et al 2019). Martins et al (2019) partly found considerable amounts (up to 24.6 µg/L) of AOH in some human urine samples collected during their biomonitoring approach to assess the exposure of the Portuguese population, which underlines the importance to gather more toxicological data for risk assessment of this mycotoxin.…”

Development of a Sensitive and Reliable UHPLC-MS/MS Method for the Determination of Multiple Urinary Biomarkers of Mycotoxin Exposure

“…Mycotoxin exposure assessment is traditionally based on calculations combining mycotoxin contamination in food data with population food consumption data [13]. Taking into account the heterogeneous distribution of mycotoxins in food, the modified forms that cannot be determined, and the sources other than dietary intake (i.e., inhalation and occupational exposure), human biomonitoring (HBM) using biomarkers of exposure in biological fluids has been accepted as a suitable alternative to assess the aggregated exposure to mycotoxins from different origins for a more accurate and comprehensive assessment at the national, regional, or even individual levels [14][15][16]. Exposure biomarkers of mycotoxins include the parent compounds themselves, the metabolites formed in vivo or products that interact with macromolecules, such as DNA or proteins [17].…”

“…Among the published methods for mycotoxin determination in biological samples, including HPLC [20,31,32], GC-MS/MS [33], LC-MS [34,35], LC-MS/MS [4,18,36,37], and LC-HRMS [38], LC-MS/MS provides remarkable selectivity, accuracy and sensitivity. Most of the methods were applied to detect common regulated mycotoxins [4,5,8,19,32,37,[39][40][41][42], employing various sample preparation strategies such as the "dilute and shoot" approach [4,5,37,41], QuEChERS [15], liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) [20], immunoaffinity (IAC) columns [41,42], solid phase extraction (SPE) [18], and various combinations of these techniques [13]. However, only a few methods targeted for Alternaria and emerging Fusarium mycotoxins, including ENNB [38,43], AOH [3], AOH and AME [15], TeA [44], ENNs, and BEA [7], for human biomonitoring.…”

Occupational Exposure to Mycotoxins—Different Sampling Strategies Telling a Common Story Regarding Occupational Studies Performed in Portugal (2012–2020)

“…Mycotoxins are a group of compounds with different toxicokinetic' characteristics, namely the half-life in human body and excretion time. It has been referred that sampling could have an influence in the exposure assessment since significant differences were determined between mycotoxins' urinary biomarkers levels when considering a 24 h urine sample or a first-morning urine sample [25]. These differences could have a higher impact when considering contaminants with short half-lives [26,27].…”

“…Human biomonitoring (HBM) is an important tool for assessing directly the exposure to mycotoxins and it is being more commonly used in the recent years to assess exposure of general population [25,[57][58][59] and workers [60][61][62]. However, it is important to note that data on background dietary exposure to mycotoxins is needed to determine the additional burden of respiratory and dermal exposure in the workplace [63] since we are dealing with an important food contaminant.…”