Human biomonitoring of mycotoxins for the detection of nutritional, environmental and occupational exposure

Abstract

The development of methods for the detection of mycotoxins as biomarker for nutritional, environmental, and occupational exposure is reviewed in this chapter. Summaries on the current state of research on mycotoxin metabolism of aflatoxins, deoxynivalenol, fumonisins, ochratoxins, and zearalenone are given. Furthermore, the development of biomarkers from these studies is discussed and excretion rates are reported. Starting from single analyte methods such as for aflatoxin M1, the first mycotoxin biomarker for aflatoxin exposure, the improvement of detection methods for aflatoxins, ochratoxin A, zearalenone, deoxynivalenol, fumonisins, and many other mycotoxins up to the recent HPLC-MS/MS methods is shown. Finally, the recently developed multi-mycotoxin methods for the detection of a broad spectrum of biomarkers and fungal metabolites is depicted and their current applications and future perspectives are discussed.