Occurrence of Fusarium mycotoxins in freshly harvested highland barley (qingke) grains from Tibet, China

In this study, a total of 150 freshly harvested qingke grain samples were obtained from three regions around the Brahmaputra River in Tibet (China) in 2020. The samples were investigated for the occurrence of 20Fusarium mycotoxins using high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC ‒MS/MS). The most frequently occurring mycotoxin was enniatin B (ENB) (46%), followed by enniatin B1 (ENB1) (14.7%), zearalenone (ZEN) (6.0%), enniatin A1 (ENA1) (3.3%), enniatin A (ENA) (1.3%), beauvericin (BEA) (0.7%), and nivalenol (NIV) (0.7%). Due to the increase in altitude, the cumulative precipitation level and average temperature decreased from the downstream to the upstream of the Brahmaputra River; this directly correlated to the contamination level of ENB in qingke, which gradually decreased from downstream to upstream. In addition, the level of ENB in qingke obtained from qingke-rape rotation was significantly lower than that from qingke-wheat and qingke-qingke rotations (p <  0.05). These results disseminated the occurrence ofFusarium mycotoxins and provided further understanding of the effect of environmental factors and crop rotation onFusarium mycotoxins.
Source: Mycotoxin Research - Category: Toxicology Source Type: research