Recent progress in mycotoxins detection based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

Mycotoxins are toxic compounds naturally produced by certain types of fungi. The contamination of mycotoxins can occur on numerous foodstuffs, including cereals, nuts, fruits, and spices, and pose a major threat to humans and animals by causing acute and chronic toxic effects. In this regard, reliable techniques for accurate and sensitive detection of mycotoxins in agricultural products and food samples are urgently needed. As an advanced analytical tool, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), presents several major advantages, such as ultrahigh sensitivity, rapid detection, fingerprint-type information, and miniaturized equipment. Benefiting from these merits, rapid growth has been observed under the topic of SERS-based mycotoxin detection. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the recent achievements in this area. The progress of SERS-based label-free detection, aptasensor, and immunosensor, as well as SERS combined with other techniques, has been summarized, and in-depth discussion of the remaining challenges has been provided, in order to inspire future development of translating the techniques invented in scientific laboratories into easy-to-operate analytic platforms for rapid detection of mycotoxins.

Geographical and Varietal Traceability of Chinese Jujubes Based on Physical and Nutritional Characteristics.

Chinese jujube fruits are known for their high nutritional and functional values. To protect advantageous regional jujube fruits, it is important to monitor quality indicators and trace the origin and variety. In this study, 31 quality indicators of Chinese jujubes collected from 6 main producing areas were determined. According to different origins and varieties, Chinese jujube fruits were divided into five and six categories, respectively. To simplify the parameters, eight of the main characteristics, namely, soluble sugar content, fresh mass, edible rate, Na, Mg, K, Zn, and cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), were screened based on multiple comparison, correlation analysis, and principal component analysis (PCA). According to the eight main parameters, it was found that that both the categorical and cross-validated classification accuracy of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were 100%. The discrimination accuracy of the testing set samples based on the orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) model were 90 and 93% for geographical and varietal classification, respectively. This indicated that the eight main parameters could be used as the characteristic parameters for the origin and variety traceability of Chinese jujubes.

Effects of different types of biochar on the anaerobic digestion of chicken manure.

This study investigated the impact of different types of biochar on the anaerobic digestion (AD) of chicken manure. Wheat straw, discarded fruitwood, and air-dried chicken manure were pyrolysed at 350, 450, and 550 °C to generate biochar. A lab-scale batch anaerobic digestion experiment was conducted at 35 ±â€¯1 °C. Substantial improvements in methane production were observed for all nine types of biochar. With the production of 294 mL CH4/g VSadded, fruitwood char pyrolysed at 550 °C increased the methane yield by 69% from the control. Characteristic analysis indicated that fruitwood char pyrolysed at 550 °C exhibited the largest specific surface area and highest total ammonia nitrogen reduction capacity. The buffering capacity of the AD system was improved by the biochar through accelerating the transformation of macromolecular substances to dissolved substrates and reducing the contents of soluble salts, total ammonia nitrogen, and free ammonia.