Review on microbial degradation of aflatoxins

ABSTRACT

Aflatoxin (AF) contamination presents one of the most insidious challenges to combat, in food safety. Its adulteration of agricultural commodities presents an important safety concern as evident in the incidences of its health implication and economic losses reported widely. Due to the overarching challenges presented by the contamination of AFs in foods and feeds, there is an urgent need to evolve cost-effective and competent strategies to combat this menace. In our review, we tried to appraise the cost-effective methods for decontamination of AFs. We identified the missing links in adopting microbial degradation as a palliative to decontamination of AFs and its commercialization in food and feed industries. Cogent areas of further research were also highlighted in the review paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Aflatoxins
• microbial degradation
• decontamination
• biodegradable products
• toxicity

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support via the Global Excellence Scheme (GES) Fellowship of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), provided to the main author (O. A. Adebo). This work was also partly supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) Center of Excellence (CoE) in Food Security co-hosted by the University of Pretoria (UP) and the University of Western Cape (UWC), South Africa.

Notes

¹ When AFs are written, the subscripts shows the relative chromatographic mobility (Trucksess and Diaz-Amigo, 2011).