Modified Mycotoxins and Multitoxin Contamination of Food and Feed as Major Analytical Challenges

Abstract

Mycotoxins, as natural products of molds, are often unavoidable contaminants of food and feed, to which the increasingly evident climate changes contribute a large part. The consequences are more or less severe and range from economic losses to worrying health problems to a fatal outcome. One of the best preventive approaches is regular monitoring of food and feed for the presence of mycotoxins. However, even under conditions of frequent, comprehensive, and conscientious controls, the desired protection goal may not be achieved. In fact, it often happens that, despite favorable analytical results that do not indicate high mycotoxin contamination, symptoms of their presence occur in practice. The most common reasons for this are the simultaneous presence of several different mycotoxins whose individual content does not exceed the detectable or prescribed values and/or the alteration of the form of the mycotoxin, which renders it impossible to be analytically determined using routine methods. When such contaminated foods enter a living organism, toxic effects occur. This article aims to shed light on the above problems in order to pay more attention to them, work to reduce their impact, and, eventually, overcome them.

What Is Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) Resistance and What Are Its Food Safety Risks in Wheat? Problems and Solutions—A Review

“…Magan et al [ 33 ] also mentioned this aspect in relation to experimental data, concluding that successful storage needs healthy grains to upload the silos . Nesic et al [ 65 ], in their review, cited many papers reporting about multitoxin contamination in cereals and wheat and this could be generally valid for all cereal crops. Further, 60–80% of the samples contained mycotoxins, and 75% of them contained two or more in a sample.…”

Application of Biosensors for the Detection of Mycotoxins for the Improvement of Food Safety

“…A significant challenge lies in the fact that much of the available empirical toxicological observations predominantly focus on the individual health effects of specific toxins. A notable research gap exists concerning the cumulative effects resulting from the concurrent presence of multiple mycotoxins [ 111 , 112 , 113 ]. In the assessment of risk, it is imperative to recognize that the distribution of mycotoxins within a product is not uniform, posing challenges in the collection of representative samples for analysis.…”

Pathological consequences, metabolism and toxic effects of trichothecene T-2 toxin in poultry

“…Recent surveys indicate that in Europe, approximately 60 to 70% of all crop samples are contaminated with mycotoxins. In some parts of Asia and America, the percentage exceeds 80% ( Luo et al, 2021 ; Nešić et al, 2023 ; Sun et al, 2023 ). Only a fraction of this contaminated amount, that poses a severe risk, is destroyed, while the remainder is used as food or feed.…”