Browsing by Author "Mateo Jiménez, Eva María"

The efficacy of ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer films (EVOH) incorporating the essential oil components cinnamaldehyde (CINHO), citral (CIT), isoeugenol (IEG), or linalool (LIN) to control growth rate (GR) and production of T-2 and HT-2 toxins by Fusarium sporotrichioides cultured on oat grains under different temperature (28, 20, and 15 C) and water activity (aw) (0.99 and 0.96) regimes was assayed. GR in controls/treatments usually increased with increasing temperature, regardless of aw, but no significant differences concerning aw were found. Toxin production decreased with increasing temperature. The effectiveness of films to control fungal GR and toxin production was as follows: EVOH-CIT > EVOH-CINHO > EVOH-IEG > EVOH-LIN. With few exceptions, effective doses of EVOH-CIT, EVOH-CINHO, and EVOH-IEG films to reduce/inhibit GR by 50%, 90%, and 100% (ED50, ED90, and ED100) ranged from 515 to 3330 g/culture in Petri dish (25 g oat grains) depending on film type, aw, and temperature. ED90 and ED100 of EVOH-LIN were >3330 g/fungal culture. The potential of several machine learning (ML) methods to predict F. sporotrichioides GR and T-2 and HT-2 toxin production under the assayed conditions was comparatively analyzed. XGBoost and random forest attained the best performance, support vector machine and neural network ranked third or fourth depending on the output, while multiple linear regression proved to be the worst.

Ochratoxin A (OTA) is a common secondary metabolite of Aspergillus ochraceus, A. carbonarius, and Penicillium verrucosum. This mycotoxin is largely present as a contaminant in several cereal crops and human foodstuffs, including grapes, corn, nuts, and figs, among others. Preclinical studies have reported the involvement of OTA in metabolic, physiologic, and immunologic disturbances as well as in carcinogenesis. More recently, it has also been suggested that OTA may impair hippocampal neurogenesis in vivo and that this might be associated with learning and memory deficits. Furthermore, aside from its widely proven toxicity in tissues other than the brain, there is reason to believe that OTA contributes to neurodegenerative disorders. Thus, in this present in vivo study, we investigated this possibility by intraperitoneally (i.p.) administering 3.5 mg OTA/kg body weight to adult male mice to assess whether chronic exposure to this mycotoxin negatively affects cell viability in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. Immunohistochemistry assays showed that doses of 3.5 mg/kg caused a significant and dose-dependent reduction in repetitive cell division and branching (from 12% to 62%). Moreover, the number of countable astrocytes (p < 0.001), young neurons (p < 0.001), and mature neurons (p < 0.001) negatively correlated with the number of i.p. OTA injections administered (one, two, three, or six repeated doses). Our results show that OTA induced adverse effects in the hippocampus cells of adult mice brain tissue when administered in cumulative doses.