Suchergebnisse

International audience ; Fusarium mycotoxins are a relevant problem in the cereal supply chain at a worldwide level, being wheat, maize and barley the main contaminated crops; mould growth could happen in the pre-harvest phase and also during transport and storage due to ineffective drying conditions. Among Fusarium toxins, deoxynivalenol (DON) is considered the most important contaminant in wheat, due to its wide-spread occurrence. In the last years the European Food Safety Authority and the European Commission had frequently expressed opinions on Fusarium toxins, setting limits, regulations and guidelines in order to reduce their levels in raw materials and food commodities: in particular European legislation (Reg. 1881\2006) sets the maximum limit for deoxynivalenol in flour and bread as 750 µg/Kg and 500 µg/Kg respectively. Relatively few studies have taken into account the loss of trichothecenes during processing, focusing on how processing factors may influence their degradation. In particular, the description of DON behavior during bread-making is very difficult, since complex physic-chemical modifications occur during the transformation of raw ingredients into the final product. In the present study, we studied how DON concentration may be influenced by modifying bread-making parameters, with a special emphasis on the fermentation and baking stages, starting from a naturally contaminated flour at both pilot and industrial scales. Exploiting the power of a Design of Experiments (DoE) approach to consider the high complexity of the studied system, the obtained model shows satisfying goodness of fit and prediction, suggesting that the baking step (time/temperature ranges) is crucial for minimizing native DON level in bread.

Abstract
The present report describes the work performed in the EFSA‐project 'Data collection, update and further development of biologically‐based models for humans and animal species to support transparency in food and feed safety'. Here, Focus is given to case studies for food and feed chemicals to predict kinetic parameters and profiles using generic and substance‐specific physiologically‐based kinetic (PBK) models for humans, including human subgroups, laboratory animal species, farm animals and a kinetic‐dynamic model in salmon. For humans, five case studies were conducted to compare kinetic predictions using the human generic PBK 6‐compartment COSMOS/TKPlatewith i) in vivo data from human clinical or biomonitoring studies, ii) substance‐specific model predictions using molecules relevant to food safety. Another five case studies assessed the impact of physiological variability (including pregnancy, renal excretion, metabolism variability, or ontogeny) and their impact on biomarkers of exposure. Case studies on laboratory and farm animals focused on theophylline, caffeine, cannabinoids, alkaloids and mycotoxins using the generic 11/12 PBK compartment models integrated in EFSA's TKPlate to assess predicted and experimental parameters i.e. plasma concentrations, excretion via milk or eggs. Overall, predictions from the human generic and substance‐specific PBK models for parameters of chronic exposure were similar and robust compared to the available experimental data. For test species and farm animals, model predictions from the generic TKPlate PBK models also performed well and were mostly within 2‐fold compared to available experimental in vivo data. In addition, 3D molecular modelling case studies were also conducted to investigate transport of chemicals (ochratoxin A, perfluoroalkyls) and cytochrome P450 metabolism (ochratoxin A, safrole and other alkenylbenzenes) as a useful tool to generate metabolism information at the molecular level. Conclusions and recommendations for future work are formulated to further develop generic PBK models for parent compounds and metabolites and further guidance to use and parameterise these models in next generation risk assessment.