Department of Pharmacy, University of Naples Federico II, Via Domenico Montesano 49, 80131 Naples, Italy.
Laboratory of Food Chemistry and Toxicology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Valencia, Av. Vicent Andrés Estellés s/n, Burjassot, 46100 Valencia, Spain.
Toxins (Basel). 2023 Feb 12;15(2):148. doi: 10.3390/toxins15020148.
Breakfast cereals have been reported as one of the most susceptible cereal-based products to mycotoxin contamination. These products pose an even more concerning risk to human health since they are marketed as a ready-to-eat product and one of its main population targets is children. Therefore, the main goal of the present study was to conduct a monitoring study of multiple mycotoxins contained in breakfast cereals samples marketed in Italy through ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution Q-Orbitrap tandem mass spectrometry. An acetonitrile-based methodology was validated for quantifying 24 mycotoxins in breakfast cereals. The results showed that 93% of the samples contained at least one mycotoxin. Beauvericin was the most prevalent toxin (86% of samples; mean concentration: 30.66 µg/kg), although the main enniatins, zearalenone-derived forms and fumonisins B1 and B2 were also detected. Co-occurrence was observed in 73% of the positive samples with up to five mycotoxins simultaneously occurring, mainly due to the combination of beauvericin and enniatins. These results provided more evidence about the high impact of non-regulated mycotoxins, such as the emerging toxins, in breakfast cereals, and encourages the development of analytical methodologies including these and zearalenone-derived forms that could be going unnoticed with current methodologies.
早餐谷类食品已被报道为最易受真菌毒素污染的谷类产品之一。这些产品对人类健康构成了更大的风险，因为它们被宣传为即食产品，其主要目标人群之一是儿童。因此，本研究的主要目的是通过超高效液相色谱-高分辨率 Q-Orbitrap 串联质谱法对意大利市场上销售的早餐谷类食品样品中的多种真菌毒素进行监测研究。建立了一种基于乙腈的方法，用于定量测定早餐谷类食品中的 24 种真菌毒素。结果表明，93%的样品至少含有一种真菌毒素。伏马菌素 B1 是最常见的毒素（86%的样品；平均浓度：30.66 µg/kg），尽管主要的恩镰孢菌素、玉米赤霉烯酮衍生形式以及伏马菌素 B1 和 B2 也被检测到。在 73%的阳性样品中观察到了共现现象，多达五种真菌毒素同时存在，主要是由于伏马菌素 B1 和恩镰孢菌素的组合。这些结果提供了更多证据表明，在早餐谷类食品中，非监管真菌毒素（如新兴毒素）的影响很大，并鼓励开发包括这些和玉米赤霉烯酮衍生形式的分析方法，因为这些毒素可能会被当前的方法所忽视。
