Aflatoxins represent a global public health and economic concern as they are responsible for significant adverse health and economic issues affecting consumers and farmers worldwide. Produced by fungal species from the Aspergillus genus, aflatoxins are a toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic group of fungal metabolites that routinely contaminate food and agricultural products. Climate and diet are essential factors in the aflatoxin contamination of food and subsequent human exposure process. Countries with warmer climates and staple foods that are aflatoxin‐susceptible shoulder a substantial portion of the global aflatoxins burden. Enactment of regulations, prevention of pre‐ and postharvest contamination, decontamination, and detoxification have been used to prevent human dietary exposure to aflatoxin. Exploiting their chemical and structural properties, means are devised to detect and quantify aflatoxin presence in foods. Herein, recent developments in several important aspects impacting aflatoxin contamination of the food supply, including: fungal producers of the toxin, occurrence in food, worldwide regulations, detection methods, preventive strategies, and removal and degradation methods were reviewed and presented. In conclusion, aflatoxin continues to be a major food safety problem, especially in developing countries where regulatory limits do not exist or are not adequately enforced. Finally, knowledge gaps and current challenges in each discussed aspect were identified, and new solutions were proposed.

Ochratoxin A (OTA) is a known food contaminant that affects a wide range of food and agricultural products. The presence of this fungal metabolite in foods poses a threat to human health. Therefore, various detection and quantification methods have been developed to determine its presence in foods. Herein, we describe a rapid and ultrasensitive tracer-based fluorescence polarization immunoassay (FPIA) for the detection of OTA in rice samples. Four fluorescent tracers OTA-fluorescein thiocarbamoyl ethylenediamine (EDF), OTA-fluorescein thiocarbamoyl butane diamine (BDF), OTA-amino-methyl fluorescein (AMF), and OTA-fluorescein thiocarbamoyl hexame (HDF) with fluorescence polarization values (δFP = FPbind-FPfree) of 5, 100, 207, and 80 mP, respectively, were synthesized. The tracer with the highest δFP value (OTA-AMF) was selected and further optimized for the development of an ultrasensitive FPIA with a detection range of 0.03–0.78 ng/mL. A mean recovery of 70.0% to 110.0% was obtained from spiked rice samples with a relative standard deviation of equal to or less than 20%. Good correlations (r2 = 0.9966) were observed between OTA levels in contaminated rice samples obtained by the FPIA method and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) as a reference method. The rapidity of the method was confirmed by analyzing ten rice samples that were analyzed within 25 min, on average. The sensitivity, accuracy, and rapidity of the method show that it is suitable for screening and quantification of OTA in food samples without the cumbersome pre-analytical steps required in other mycotoxin detection methods.

Biocontrol to combat the menace of Aspergillus flavus has gained considerable attention. However, the molecular mechanisms of A. flavus ’s response to antagonism biotic stress are poorly deciphered. Here, we discovered that A. flavus switches an adaptive metabolic reprogramming to ensure its adversity survival by multiomics analyses (including four omics platform). Antifungal “weapons” lipopeptides and antibacterial metabolites of imizoquin were identified. The central metabolism fluxes were significantly depleted but the expressions of most corresponding genes were considerably increased in A. flavus. Secondary metabolism that does not contribute to stress was markedly suppressed. In contrast, A. flavus antibacterial “weapon arsenal” was activated to occupy an ecological niche. Our results revealed that interlinked mitochondrial central metabolism and secondary metabolism are central to A. flavus antagonism biotic stress response. This discovery contributes to the targeted design of biocontrol agents and smart regularization of rhizosphere microbiome homeostasis to realize long-term fungi pathogen control and mitigation mycotoxin contamination.