The association of food ingredients in breakfast cereal products and fumonisins production: risks identification and predictions.

Breakfast processed products are remarkably at risk of fungal contamination. This research surveyed the fumonisins concentration in different breakfast products and carried out in vitro experiments measuring fumonisins content in different substrates inoculated with Fusarium verticillioides. The pipeline started with the identification of combinations of ingredients for 58 breakfast products. Twenty-three core ingredients, seven nutritional components and production types were analyzed using a Pearson correlation, k-means clustering, and principal component analysis to show that no single factor is responsible for high fumonisins detection in processed cereals products. Consequently, decision tree regression was used as a means of determining and visualizing complex logical interactions between the same factors. We clustered the association of ingredients in low, medium, and high risk of fumonisin detection. The analysis showed that high fumonisins concentration is associated with those products that have high maize concentrations coupled especially with high sodium or rice. In an in vitro experiment, different media were prepared by mixing the ingredients in the proportion found in the first survey and by measuring fumonisins production by Fusarium verticillioides. Results showed that (1) fumonisins production by F. verticillioides is boosted by the synergistic effect of maize and highly ready carbohydrate content such as white flour; (2) a combination of maize > 26% (w/w), rice > 2.5% (w/w), and NaCl > 2.2% (w/w) led to high fumonisins production, while mono-ingredient products were more protective against fumonisins production. The observations in the in vitro experiments appeared to align with the decision tree model that an increase in ingredient complexity can lead to fumonisins production by Fusarium. However, more research is urgently needed to develop the area of predictive mycology based on the association of processing, ingredients, fungal development, and mycotoxins production.

Mycotoxins and flours: Effect of type of crop, organic production, packaging type on the recovery of fungal genus and mycotoxins.

Heat-stable mycotoxins are widely detected in flour and produced by Aspergillus spp., Fusarium spp. and Penicillium spp. Forty different flours purchased in Italy are used to assess potential risk factors via a systematically screening of a number of variables: the type of flour, organic, whole and white wheat, types of packaging (paper, plastic and weight). Fungal recovery and co-occurrence of specific mycotoxins was also assessed. The results showed that flour originated from fruits had a significant higher recovery of fungi, while seed/pseudocereals had the highest mycotoxins detection. Flours originating from organic agriculture are more prone to higher fungal recovery and mycotoxins detection when compared with not-organic flours. Packaging is also important: packaging weighting less than 376 g supports significantly more fungal recovery and the plastic packages was observed to retain more fungi and mycotoxins detection when compared with paper. Recovery measured as Log (CFU/g) of fungal genera is not directly proportional to the amount of mycotoxins. Finally, linear regression and mixed logit regression models show that the mean level of aflatoxins B1 (ng/g on the logarithmic scale) reduces by 0.485 when moving from an organic to a non-organic flour, while a significant increase of 0.369 when moving from paper to a plastic packaging.