The association of food ingredients in breakfast cereal products and fumonisins production: risks identification and predictions

Breakfast processed products are remarkably at risk of fungal contamination. This research surveyed the fumonisins concentration in different breakfast products, and carried out in-vitro experiments measuring fumonisins content in different substrates inoculated with Fusarium verticillioides. The pipeline started with the identification of combinations of ingredients for 58 breakfast products. Twenty-three core ingredients, seven nutritional components and production types were analyzed using a Pearson correlation, k-means clustering and principal component analysis to show that no single factor is responsible for high fumonisins detection in processed cereals products. Consequently, decision tree regression was used as a means of determining and visualizing complex logical interactions between the same factors. We clustered the association of ingredients in low, medium, and high risk of fumonisin detection. The analysis showed that high fumonisins concentration is associated with those products that have high maize concentrations coupled especially with high sodium or rice. In a in-vitro experiment, different media were prepared by mixing the ingredients in the proportion found in the first survey and by measuring fumonisins production by Fusarium verticillioides. Results showed that: 1) fumonisins production by F. verticillioides is boosted by the synergistic effect of maize and highly ready carbohydrate content such as white flour; 2) a combination of maize >26%(w/w), rice >2.5%(w/w), NaCl >2.2%(w/w) led to high fumonisins production, while mono-ingredient products were more protective against fumonisins production. The observations in the in-vitro experiments appeared to align with the decision tree model that an increase in ingredient complexity can lead to fumonisins production by Fusarium. However, more research is urgently needed to develop the area of predictive mycology based on the association of processing, ingredients, fungal development, and mycotoxins production.

Copyright © The Author(s) 2023
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/