Hepatotoxicity of food-borne mycotoxins: molecular mechanism, anti-hepatotoxic medicines and target prediction

Abstract

Mycotoxins are metabolites produced by fungi. The widespread contamination of food and feed by mycotoxins is a global food safety problem and a serious threat to people’s health. Most food-borne mycotoxins have strong hepatotoxicity. However, no effective methods have been found to prevent or treat Mycotoxin- Induced Liver Injury (MILI) in clinical and animal husbandry. In this paper, the molecular mechanisms and potential anti-MILI medicines of six food-borne MILI are reviewed, and their targets are predicted by network toxicology, which provides a theoretical basis for further study of the toxicity mechanism of MILI and the development of effective strategies to manage MILI-related health problems in the future and accelerate the development of food safety.

Keywords:

• Anti-hepatotoxic medicines
• hepatotoxicity
• molecular mechanism
• mycotoxins
• target prediction

Author’s contributions

Haonan Ruan: Writing - original draft, Data curation, Software, Validation; Qian Lu: Writing - review & editing, Data curation, Software; Jiashuo Wu: Data curation, Visualization; Jiaan Qin: Supervision, Conceptualization; Ming Sui: Software; Xinqi Sun: Data curation; Yue Shi: Supervision, Writing - review & editing; Jiaoyang Luo: Supervision, Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing; Meihua Yang: Supervision, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors have declared that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81872999), CAMS Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences (2017-I2M-1-013), and the Foreign Experts Project (G20200001511).