Evaluation of process cleaning and polishing of wheat grains for the elimination of mycotoxin deoxynivalenol

Abstract

In wheat, the incidence of mycotoxins can be directly related to impurities and foreign matter present in stored grain. One of mycotoxins in wheat is often developed deoxynivalenol or DON. For this reason this work was conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the cleaning of wheat for reduction of this mycotoxin. For this purpose, 90 samples of a given lot of wheat contaminated by deoxynivalenol were analyzed in three stages of the process: dirty wheat, wheat after the first cleaning, wheat after the second cleaning and the samples of the products originated from the milling process. The results showed a reduction of deoxynivalenol of 14,9 g/kg after the first cleaning, 15,4 g/kg after the second cleaning and a total reduction of 27,6 g/kg. In the analysis of impurities removed from the process were detected high levels of mycotoxin with 2805,2 μg/kg of impurities removed in the process of first cleaning and 3016,4 μg/kg of impurities removed in the second cleaning process. In the samples of the products extracted from the grinding of clean wheat, were analyzed samples of flour 1 624,0 μg/kg, flour 2 686,0 μg/kg and bran 1070,0 μg/kg. The products resulting from the milling process presented a certain level of desoxinivalenol, not meeting current legislation for the wheat bran and products for infant feeding, demonstrating thereby that the total elimination would require the use of specific equipment for this purpose.