Ricerc@Sapienza

Climate change, environmental degradation threaten cereal production and world food security. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) data alarms that by 2050, world annual demand for maize, rice and wheat is expected to reach some 3.3 billion tonnes, or 800 million tonnes more than 2014¿s record combined harvest. However, climate change could have catastrophic effects on wheat yields and reduce maize yields in Africa by 20 percent. In Asia, rising sea levels threaten rice production in major river deltas.
Global warming will impact not only the reducing yields but also the food and feed safety, in fact the mycotoxins being considered one of the most important hazards linked to the climate change.
These reasons lead scholars to focus their research on mycotoxin analysis methods and stem the spread of contamination by these metabolites.
Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the presence of mycotoxigenic fungi and them mycotoxins in cereals by using advanced molecular and analytical techniques.
HPLC-MS/MS analysis is able to determine simultaneously the presence of different metabolites. Therefore, it can be applied to analyse mycotoxins, including those defined as emerging, whose contamination limits are not reported in European directives. PCR method is highly specific in detecting fungal species through the amplification of specie-specific and mycotoxin pathway genes.
The combination of these two techniques will provide a tight method of investigation on the contamination of maize, rice and wheat.