Armillariella tabescen enzymatic detoxification of aflatoxin B1 (Part II)

Review on microbial degradation of aflatoxins

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.

Microbial strategies to control aflatoxins in food and feed

Aflatoxins are a group of toxic and carcinogenic fungal metabolites. They are commonly found in cereals, nuts and animal feeds and create a significant threat to the food industry and animal production. Several strategies have been developed to avoid or reduce harmful effects of aflatoxins since the 1960s. However, prevention of aflatoxin contamination pre/post harvest or during storage has not been satisfactory and control strategies such as physical removing and chemical inactivating used in food commodities have their deficiencies, which limit their large scale application. It is expected that progress in the control of aflatoxin contamination will depend on the introduction of technologies for specific, efficient and environmentally sound detoxification. The utilisation of biological detoxification agents, such as microorganisms and/or their enzymatic products to detoxify aflatoxins in contaminated food and feed can be a choice of such technology. To date, many of the microbial strategies have only showed reduced concentration of aflatoxins and the structure and toxicity of the detoxified products are unclear. More attention should be paid to the detoxification reactions, the structure of biotransformed products and the enzymes responsible for the detoxification. In this article, microbial strategies for aflatoxin control such as microbial binding and microbial biotransformation are reviewed.