Development of an ELISA-based method for testing aflatoxigenicity and aflatoxigenic variability among Aspergillus species in culture
Development of an ELISA-based method for testing aflatoxigenicity and aflatoxigenic variability among Aspergillus species in culture
Blog Article
Aflatoxins contaminate foodstuff posing a severe threat to human health because chronic exposure is Samsung GS20+ linked to liver cancer while acute exposure may cause death.Therefore, it is of interest to reduce the contamination of crops by aflatoxins in the field and post-harvest.Among the current technologies being developed is the deployment of non-aflatoxigenic strains of Aspergillus species to competitively exclude aflatoxigenic conspecifics from crops in the field thereby curtailing aflatoxin production by the former.The success in this endeavor makes the non-aflatoxigenic fungi good candidates for biological control programs.However, the current techniques for segregating non-aflatoxigenic from aflatoxigenic fungi suffer two main drawbacks: they are based on morphological and chemical tests with a combination of visual color changes detected in a culture plate which suffer some degree of inaccuracy.
Secondly, the existing methods are incapable of accurately quantifying aflatoxin production by fungi in culture.We developed a culture system for inducing aflatoxin production by Aspergillus using maize kernels as growth substrate followed by quantification using ELISA.The method was compared to the Dichlorvos-Ammonia (DV-AM) method for determining aflatoxigenicity.Our findings encapsulate a method more Fat Eighth Bundles robust than the currently used DV-AM approach because, for the first time, we are able to assess aflatoxigenicity and aflatoxigenic variability among Aspergillus species earlier classified as non-aflatoxigenic by the DV-AM method.Furthermore, the new method presents an opportunity to attribute the toxin production by actively growing fungal cultures.
We believe this method when further developed presents a chance to study and predict fungal behavior prior to field trials for biological control programs.Keywords: ELISA, Aflatoxin, Aspergillus, Aflatoxigenic variability, Aflatoxigenicity, Dichlorvos-Ammonia (DV-AM).