Study On Contamination And Risk Assessment Of Mycotoxins In Nuts And Dried Fruits

In this study,16 mycotoxins were analyzed in ten kinds of dried fruits and nuts sampled from four climate zones(CZs)in China.The four climate zones are the arid zone(AZ),the semiarid zone(SZ),the semiarid to semihumid zone(SSZ)and the humid zone(HZ).The sixteen mycotoxins are contained with four categorizes of mycotoxins,including aflatoxins(AFB1,AFB2,AFG1 and AFG2),ochratoxins(OTA and OTB),the Alternaria toxins(TEN,AOH,and AME)and the trichothecene toxins(T-2,ZEA,ENA,ENA1,ENB,ENB1 and BEA).To the best of our knowledge,this was the first work in which risk assessment of multi-mycotoxins through consuming of dried fruits and nuts were performed especially including the emerging ENNs and BEA in China.The results of this research would contribute a lot in regulating the production and consumption of dried fruits and nuts.The main conclusions of this study are as follow:1.Utilized detection method for multi-mycotoxins in varied samples:Results show that the limits of detection(LODs)for the sixteen mycotoxins range from 0.01μg·L-1to 2.01μg·L-1,with favorable linearity acquiring between 1~200 μg·L-1 and correlation coefficients above 0.9981.The average recoveries of the sixteen mycotoxins in ten matrices are in the range of70.48%~118.48% at three addition level.The relative standard deviations(RSD,n = 6)are between0.28%~11.85%.This economical,fast,simple and efficient method is completely applied for simultaneous detection of multi-mycotoxins in different dried fruits matrixes.2.Occurrence and co-occurrence of mycotoxins in samples:AFs,TCs and ATs were found in 9 kinds of dried fruits and nuts excepting pine nuts,raisins and dried longans respectively.The most frequent mycotoxin detected is TCs(24.1%)with contamination level ranging from <LOQ~473.16 μg·kg-1.66 out of 124 positive samples are detected with two to eight mycotoxins.One sample is contaminated with all four categories of mycotoxins.Significant differences are found in AFB1,AFG1,AOH,AME and ENNs contamination among the four CZs.Specifically,the ENNs contamination level is significantly higher in samples from the CZ-SS than the other three climate zones.The frequency of mycotoxin co-occurrence in samples from CZ-SS(26/66)is dramatically higher than from CZ-A(14/66),CZ-S(9/66)and CZ-H(17/66).3.Multi-mycotoxin exposure assessment for consumption of nuts and dried fruits:The EDI values of the fifteen mycotoxins are lower than other countries through the consumption of dried fruits and nuts.For risk characterization,dietary exposure to the individual or combinational TCs,ATs and OTA through consumption of nuts and dried fruits show no health risks to Chinese adults according to both analyzing approaches.The dietary exposure to individual and total AFs by consuming of dried fruits and nuts pose acceptable health risk and the risk levels are lower than other countries.