Structure elucidation and toxicity analysis of the degradation products of deoxynivalenol by gaseous ozone

Abstract

Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) or scab is a fungal disease of cereal grains. Wheat scab affects the yield and quality of wheat and produces mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol (DON), which can seriously threaten human and animal health. In this study, gaseous ozone was used to degrade DON in wheat scab and the degradation products of ozonolysis were analyzed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography quadrupole-orbitrap mass spectrometry (UHPLC Q-Orbitrap). Toxicology analyses of the degradation products were also studied using structure-activity relationships. Ozone (8 mg L−1 concentration) was applied to 2 μg mL−1 of DON in ultrapure water, resulted in 95.68% degradation within 15 s. Ten ozonized products of DON in ultrapure water were analyzed and six main products (C15H18O7, C15H18O9, C15H22O9, C15H20O10, C15H18O8, and C15H20O9) were analyzed at varying concentrations of ozone and DON. Structural formulae were assigned to fragmentation products generated by MS2 and Mass Frontier® software. According to structure-activity relationship studies, the toxicities of the ozonized products were significantly decreased due to de-epoxidation and the attack of ozone at the C9-10 double bond in DON. Based on the results of the study above, we can find that gaseous ozone is an efficient and safe technology to degrade DON, and these results may provide a theoretical basis for the practical research of detoxifying DON in scabby wheat and other grains.