Univ.-Prof. Dr. Rudolf Krska ist Leiter des Analytikzentrums (AZ) des BOKU (Universität für Bodenkultur Wien)-Departments IFA-Tulln.
Abstract:
Mycotoxins are low-molecular-weight, secondary metabolites of fungi which are toxic to animals and humans even in low concentrations. Their occurrence in various food crops is of major concern since it has significant implications for food and feed safety, food security and international trade. The total costs of mycotoxin contamination due to reduced yields, food and feed losses, increased costs for inspection and analyses, and others, may easily reach billions of Euro annually as estimated by Wu and Munkvold (2008). Despite huge research investments on mycotoxins and other toxic secondary metabolites of fungi and plants, prevention, control and proper exposure assessment remain difficult and agricultural and food industry continue to be vulnerable to problems of contamination. With practical and affordable tools that build on existing research-results, stakeholders along the food and feed chain could reduce the risk of mycotoxin contamination in crops, food and feed. These tools, as developed in the EC-funded project MyToolBox ( www.mytoolbox.eu) prevent losses and waste along the food and feed chain, and provide traceable information to the supply chain and consumers using mainstream information and communication technology (ICT).  
In the last few years, “mycotoxin analysis” has continuously developed from the targeted analysis of individual mycotoxins to metabolite profiling and metabolomics of (ideally) all secondary metabolites that are present in food crops and which are involved in plant-fungus interactions. High performance liquid chromatography- tandem mass spectrometric LC (HR)MS(/MS) methods have led to unexpected occurrence data on the presence of so-called emerging mycotoxins including novel and conjugated (masked) mycotoxins, as e.g. the glutathione-mediated detoxification products of the Fusarium toxin deoxynivalenol. This paper will summarize trends and new approaches to control, detect and reduce mycotoxins in the food and feed chain with special emphasis on  multi-toxin screening of food and feed commodities.

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Im Rahmen des GÖCH Vortrags findet die Wahl des/der Leiters/Leiterin der Zweigstelle Salzburg für die folgende Amtsperiode statt.