Lactic Acid Bacteria as Antifungal and Anti‐Mycotoxigenic Agents: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Fungal contamination of food and animal feed, especially by mycotoxigenic fungi, is not only a global food quality concern for food manufacturers, but it also poses serious health concerns because of the production of a variety of mycotoxins, some of which present considerable food safety challenges. In today's mega‐scale food and feed productions, which involve a number of processing steps and the use of a variety of ingredients, fungal contamination is regarded as unavoidable, even good manufacturing practices are followed. Chemical preservatives, to some extent, are successful in retarding microbial growth and achieving considerably longer shelf‐life. However, the increasing demand for clean label products requires manufacturers to find natural alternatives to replace chemically derived ingredients to guarantee the clean label. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB), with the status generally recognized as safe (GRAS), are apprehended as an apt choice to be used as natural preservatives in food and animal feed to control fungal growth and subsequent mycotoxin production. LAB species produce a vast spectrum of antifungal metabolites to inhibit fungal growth; and also have the capacity to adsorb, degrade, or detoxify fungal mycotoxins including ochratoxins, aflatoxins, and Fusarium toxins. The potential of many LAB species to circumvent spoilage associated with fungi has been exploited in a variety of human food and animal feed stuff. This review provides the most recent updates on the ability of LAB to serve as antifungal and anti‐mycotoxigenic agents. In addition, some recent trends of the use of LAB as biopreservative agents against fungal growth and mycotoxin production are highlighted.

The Fatty-Acid Hydratase Activity of the Most Common Probiotic Microorganisms

“…Overall, the results obtained are collected in Table 1 and allow for a number of considerations. The biotransformation experiments lasted four days and were performed in a 5 L fermenter in anaerobic conditions at 37 • C and using a starting fatty acid concentration of 3 g/L (stirring 170 rpm, pH 6.2); yields were calculated on the basis of the weight of isolated hydroxyacids; 2 According to preliminary experiments performed in an anaerobic flask, the hydroxy-acid derivatives were obtained in low yields (<5% by GC-MS analysis); 3 According to preliminary experiments performed in an anaerobic flask, the hydroxy-acid derivatives were not detected or their relative amounts were very low (<1% by GC-MS analysis); 4 The ee of compound 9 was not measured. Its NMR analysis indicates the presence of a single diastereoisomeric form.…”

“…The growth of the probiotics market has fostered the biochemical studies of these species, especially those regarding the microorganism-human being interaction. Despite this fact, their use as biocatalysts for industrial biotransformation is restricted to a limited number of applications [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Among the most known probiotic bacteria, those belonging to the genus Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium turned out to be the most promising for industrial purposes.…”

Multi-Product Lactic Acid Bacteria Fermentations: A Review

“…Owing to their versatile metabolism and their ability to synthesize a wide range of beneficial metabolites in addition to LA, LAB are extensively used in biotechnology, food, and therapeutic products. Some of the applications of LAB include their use as additional hurdles for spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms, antifungal and anti-mycotoxigenic agents, bacteriocin producers, nutraceutical producers, probiotics and starter cultures, among others [6,10,[16][17][18][19]. After safety assessment, the United States (US) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) included numerous LAB species and food additives derived from them on the generally recognized as safe (GRAS) inventory or accordingly granted the qualified presumption of safety (QPS) status [6,20].…”

Potential Application of Lactic Acid Bacteria to Reduce Aflatoxin B1 and Fumonisin B1 Occurrence on Corn Kernels and Corn Ears

“…However, authors have shown that the antifungal activity of these compounds alone was too low to fully explain the antifungal activity observed [29,30]. Thus, other metabolites have been studied as the source of antifungal activity such as proteinaceous compounds, fatty acids, phenolic acid, hydrogen peroxide, and bacteriocins [31][32][33][34].…”