Early detection of toxigenic Fusarium graminearum in wheat.

GIROTTI JUAN R.; MALBRÁN ISMAEL; LORI GLADYS; JUÁREZ M PATRICIA

World Mycotoxin Journal

Wageningen Academic Publishers

Lugar: Wageningen; Año: 2012 vol. 5 p. 143 - 152

1875-0710

Abstract Fusarium graminearum (Schwabe) contaminates agricultural crops and commodities with trichothecenes, mostly deoxynivalenol (DON) and its acetyl-derivatives. Current techniques available to detect the end mycotoxin contamination products usually require an extended time lag between sampling and the corresponding sanitary report, and include different clean-up steps and eventually derivatization. This study was aimed to develop a methodology to detect toxigenic F. graminearum prior to mycotoxin production. Headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) coupled to capillary gas chromatography (CGC) is here shown to be useful to predict the potential of trichothecene mycotoxin formation by detecting the presence of F. graminearum at early stages of fungal growth in wheat cultivars, based on the detection of trichodiene (TRI), the volatile intermediate of trichothecenes. We showed that TRI is a useful marker to detect toxigenic Fusarium in wheat spikes from live plants, regardless of the actual development of Fusarium head blight (FHB) disease. This is the first predictive methodology for FHB and trichothecene occurrence in field-collected samples, and might be a useful tool to help prevent the risk of mycotoxin contamination.