OTASENS

ADVANCED TOOLS FOR RAPID AND ON-SITE DETECTION OF OCHRATOXIN IN THE FOOD CHAIN FROM FARM TO FORK

CUP: H53D23010530001

Programma di finanziamento: PRIN-PNRR

Ente finanziatore: MUR

Periodo: 01/12/2023-30/11/2025

Finanziamento totale: € 52.275,00

Partner:

ISPA-CNR
Università della Basilicata

Descrizione

Because of global warming, climate change represents a threat to agriculture and food security because it affects crop production and supply. Mycotoxin production may be even higher in regions vulnerable to climate change since spatial-temporal risks depend on the climate change rhythm in each region or country. In addition, mycotoxin combinations have caused the appearance of new fungal genotypes with elevated levels of aggressiveness; their altered production has already been documented. The effects of climate change on mycotoxin production have direct and important repercussions on human health. In this perspective, research and innovation in the area of food safety and in particular, in mycotoxin risk assessment, are keys to making food systems more sustainable, resilient, inclusive and healthy. OTASens aims to demonstrate and validate the use of biosensor-based rapid testing systems for monitoring the mycotoxin Ochratoxin A (OTA) in the pork meat-producing chain with a farm-to-fork approach. Such a tool is proposed as an innovative detection system to promote the safety of the swine production chain, via ease of use, affordability, and shorter time-to-results compared to the traditional methods used for OTA detection. OTA is a mycotoxin that is produced by the fungal genera Aspergillus and Penicillium in feeds and foods and has been proven to possess several health detrimental effects in animals and humans. Humans are exposed to OTA because of the consumption of agri-foods and food derived from animals that were fed with contaminated feed. OTA detection requires expensive equipment and long analytical time; as such, rapid tools that might contribute to timely and efficiently put in place of corrective measures are desirable. In OTAsens project, the OTA biosensor will be validated for its use on swine growing chains, in feed and in animals’ blood. Artificial contamination of feed with OTA and its producing fungi will be performed at lab level during the setup and tuning of the biosensor. As indicator of the individual exposure to OTA, commercial swine blood will be used and artificially inoculated with OTA. In collaboration with farms and feed mills mainly located in the South Italy, the system will be then validated and applied for on-site use, with the view of replacing the costly, slow and laborious conventional techniques to assess mycotoxin contamination and the compliance with current EU limits/recommendations for feeds and foods (i.e., Liquid Chromatography coupled with Mass Spectrometry or Fluorometric Detectors, LC-MS/FLD). In addition, a prototype of a hardware/software system for OTA analysis (lab-on-chip device) will be designed and assembled, exploiting the knowledge obtained in the development and testing of the OTA.