Using metabolomics to guide strategies to tackle the issue of the contamination of food and feed with mycotoxins: A review of the literature with specific focus on Fusarium mycotoxins

The risk of contamination of agricultural commodities with mycotoxins affects every part of the world. Despite all the efforts of the past decades to improve control strategies to minimize the contamination levels of these toxic fungal metabolites including the implementation of good agricultural and manufacturing practices, there is currently no available strategies that allow ensuring the lack of mycotoxins in food and feed products. This is especially true for mycotoxins produced by Fusarium species that mostly contaminate cereal grains during crop cultivation and are only partially removed by processing. A key condition to strengthen prevention strategies is to increase the knowledge regarding the determinants and factors that govern the fungal growth and production of mycotoxins and lead to the contamination of agricultural commodities. To tackle this challenge, metabolomics is a method of choice. Indeed, metabolomics that allows exploring the connections between central metabolism and specialized fungal metabolic pathways is a golden tool to decipher the regulatory mechanisms of mycotoxin biosynthesis. Metabolomics is also a powerful tool to investigate the chemical interactions between toxigenic fungi and both the plant host and the surrounding microbial communities. Additionally, metabolomics has the potential to meet the challenge of simultaneously analyzing the major and so-called emerging mycotoxins together with their modified forms and is therefore a promising technology to increase the reliability of risk assessment. In this review, we intend to demonstrate how metabolomic applications could pave the avenue for new and efficient developments to mitigate food and feed contamination with mycotoxins.

Automated summary

The risk of agricultural commodities being contaminated with mycotoxins is a global issue, and currently there are no strategies to guarantee the absence of mycotoxins in food and feed products. Metabolomics is a key tool to understand the determinants of fungal growth and mycotoxin production, and can help develop new ways to mitigate contamination.