IN VITRO STUDY OF THE EFFICACY OF MYCOTOXINS DEGRADATION BY FEED ENZYMES

Providing healthy and safe food in terms of mycotoxicological safety is an imperative for not only good and sustainable livestock production, but also for the population that consumes food of both plant and animal origin. Climate change in the temperate regions of southern Europe has led to frequent occurrence of aflatoxins, deoxynivalenol and zearalenone in cereals. In order to reduce harmful effects of these toxins on animal health as well as to avoid large economic losses, various feed additives are increasingly being used. All of them must first of all be safe, and then have certain efficiency in the fight against mycotoxins. Although in vivo experiments are mandatory to assess the efficacy, in vitro test offers the advantage of rapid screening of the efficacy of a large number of food additives. In this paper, the efficiency of two commercial products belonging to the enzyme group for animal nutrition was investigated for degradation of aflatoxin B1, zearalenone and deoxynivalenol using in vitro experiments. For this purpose, two different methodologies were used according to the recommendation of the enzyme manufacturer. The percentage of mycotoxin degradation was recorded by high pressure liquid chromatography and ELISA methods. One of the tested enzymes showed a very high efficiency in zearalenone degradation being as much as 96%. Both tested enzyme samples showed similar percentage of aflatoxin B1 degradation (about 35%). Deoxynivalenol was not significantly degradable under the applied test conditions.