Review
Occurrence of fumonisins in foods

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2004.06.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Fumonisins (FB) are synthesized mainly by different species of the genus Fusarium and FB1 is the predominating fumonisin isolated in foods. FB1 shows different toxicological effects in humans and animals and has been associated with esophageal cancer in different countries. This review presents an overview of the worldwide occurrence of fumonisins in crops and human foods being corn and corn meal the most contaminated foods, and reviews variations of the presence of these mycotoxins in foods and in agricultural crops. In foods, these variations are due to the alkaline solutions, water and temperature. For agricultural crops, the role of climatic conditions and latitude, genotypes, spoilage and other fungal diseases is reviewed.

Introduction

Fusarium spp. are ubiquitous in soils. These fungi have a disease cycle with several possible infection pathways (Munkvold & Desjardins, 1997):

  • Infection from seed to cob and to grain through systemic movement in stalk.

  • Infection from root to grain through stalk and cob.

  • Infection from airborne or water-splashed conidia to silk and to grain.

  • Infection through wounds caused by insects that can also act as vectors of inoculum.

Fumonisins are a group of mycotoxins isolated initially from corn culture material of Fusarium moniliforme (Gelderblom et al., 1988). The elucidation of the chemical structure of the fumonisins was carried out by Bezuidenhout et al. (1988). Since 1988, fumonisin mycotoxins have been isolated from certain Fusarium species (i.e., Fusarium verticillioides and Fusarium proliferatum) and from Alternaria alternata f.sp. lycopersici (Chen, Mirocha, Xie, Hogge, & Olson, 1992). To date, several fumonisins (FB) have been isolated and characterized. Only FB1, FB2 and FB3 are the major ones produced in naturally contaminated foods and their molecular structures are shown in Fig. 1. The FB1 has the structure 2S-amino-12S,16R-dimethyl-3S,5R, 10R,14S,15R-penta-hydroxy-eicosane with the C-14 and C-15 hydroxy groups esterified by a terminal carboxyl group of propane-1,2,3-tricarboxylic acid (TCA). FB2 is 10-deoxy FB1 and FB3 is 5-deoxy FB1. The free amino group appears to play a specific role in the biological activity of FB1 (Bolger et al., 2001). The FC1, FC2, FC3 and FC4 lacking the C-1 terminal methyl group which is characteristic for the other fumonisins. Aminopentol (AP1) is to hidrolysed form of FB1.

These mycotoxins are associated with equine leukoencephalomacia (Kellerman et al., 1990; Marasas et al., 1988; Wilson et al., 1990), porcine pulmonary edema (Harrison, Colvin, Green, Newman, & Cole, 1990), nephrotoxicity and liver cancer in rats (Gelderblom, Kriek, Marasas, & Thiel, 1991), atherogenic effects in vervet monkey (Fincham et al., 1992), medial hypertrophy of pulmonary arteries in swine (Casteel, Turk, & Rottinghaus, 1994), atherosclerosis in monkeys (Norred, 1993), immunosuppression in poultry (Li, Ledoux, Bermudez, Fritsche, & Rottinghaus, 1999) and brain haemorrhage in rabbits (Bucci, Hansen, & LaBorde, 1996). Their natural occurrence in home-grown corn was statistically associated with the high rate of human esophageal cancer in Africa (Marasas et al., 1988; Rheeder et al., 1992; Sydenham et al., 1990b; Thiel, Marasas, Sydenham, Shephard, & Gelderblom, 1992), in northern Italy (Franceschi, Bidoli, Baron, & La Vecchia, 1990), in Iran (Shephard et al., 2000), the Southeast of the United States (Gelderblom, Marasas, Vleggaar, Thiel, & Cawood, 1992; Rheeder et al., 1992) and with the promotion of primary liver cancer in certain endemic areas of the People’s Republic of China (Chu & Li, 1994; Groves et al., 1999; Li, Yoshizawa, Kawamura, Luo, & Li, 2001). Fumonisins are possibly carcinogenic to humans and according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, they are class 2B carcinogens (WHO-IARC, 1993). Furthermore, these compounds have been implicated in a foodborne disease outbreak characterized by abdominal pain, borborygmi and diarrhea in a few villages in India due to the consumption of contaminated corn and sorghum (Bhat, Shetty, Amruth, & Sudershan, 1997). A review of legislation of fumonisins in foods has been recently published by Soriano and Dragacci (2004).

Methods for analysis of fumonisins use extraction with a mixture of methanol–water (Scott & Lawrence, 1994), acetonitrile–water (Castelo, Sumner, & Bullerman, 1998b) or acetonitrile–methanol–water (Visconti, Solfrizzo, & De Girolamo, 2001), followed by a clean up step by solid phase extraction (SPE) on reverse phase (C18) (Rice, Ross, Dejong, Plattner, & Coats, 1995), immunoaffinity columns (IAC) (Trucksess, Stack, Allen, & Barrion, 1995) or by strong anion exchange (SAX) cartridges (Sydenham et al., 1996). Detection and quantification are mainly performed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorimetric (Akiyama, Uraroongroj, Miyahara, Goda, & Toyoda, 1997) or mass spectrometric detection (Musser, 1996). Furthermore, thin-layer (Preis & Vargas, 2000) and gas chromatography (Sydenham et al., 1990b), capillary electrophoresis (Hines, Brueggemann, Holcomb, & Holder, 1995; Holcomb & Thompson, 1996) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) (Abouzied, Askegard, Bird, & Miller, 1996; Ono et al., 2001) are also used. A review by Plattner, Weisleder, and Poling (1996) clarifies that extraction with aqueous acetonitrile, clean-up on IAC, followed by derivatization with o-phthaldialdehyde and HPLC on a reverse phase column is a good method of analysis for fumonisins with a detection limit from 0.01 to 0.05 μg/g sample dry weight (Plattner et al., 1996).

Section snippets

Occurrence

A review of Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5 suggested that higher concentrations of fumonisins did occur in corn and corn meal and lower or undetectable concentrations in cornflake breakfast cereals, canned cream-style corn, corn tortillas, tortillas corn chips and popcorn: this is due to the fact that corn meal receives only a physical processing treatment and the other products are further processed. Doko and Visconti (1994) reported that in corn-based foods from Italy the highest

Conclusions

FB1 is the predominating fumonisin isolated in corn crops and foods being the occurrence of this micotoxin in crops related with the climate, genotypes, spoilage and other fungal diseases. The fumonisingenic-fungi need a high temperature (i.e., 20–30 °C) and a water activity (i.e., 0.98) to produce the mycotoxin. Furthermore, conditions of cultivation and genotypes help to develop FBs being transgenic corn more resistance to Fusarium growth versus traditional corn. Finally, reducing insect

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the Conselleria d’Innovació i Competitivitat de la Generalitat Valenciana (Spain) for a grant to J.M. Soriano.

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