Fungal volatile organic compounds, can be used to develop aflatoxin-specific sensors?

Foodstuff (corn, wheat, rice, etc.) can be contaminated by several filamentous fungal species in pre or post-harvest conditions. Some of these, such as Aspergillus, Fusarium and Penicillium produce secondary metabolites, highly toxic at low concentrations to all vertebrates including humans: they can cause severe illnesses upon chronic exposure and can even lead to death after acute exposure. These non-volatile molecules are named mycotoxins and current methods to detect them, involving the use of ELISA tests or HPLC, are quite time consuming and expensive. At present there is no rapid test that does not require extensive sample preparation to detect the presence of mycotoxin directly in a production line (e.g. grain storage companies).
Therefore, the aim of this work is to identify volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted specifically when mycotoxins are produced that could be used as markers to detect mycotoxins in foodstuff.
Using Solid Phase Micro Extraction technique, we have characterized and compared the VOCs produced by non-toxigenic and toxigenic strains of Aspergillus flavus (producing aflatoxins B1). The analyses have shown similarities and differences between the two categories of strains. Both of them emit a common VOCs consisting mainly in alcohol (2-methylbutan-1-ol, propan-1-ol, 2-methylpropan-1-ol), ester (ethyl isobutyrate, ethyl acetate) and aldehyde (2-methylbutanal, 2-methyl-2-enal) many of which are known in the literature to be specific of fungi.
The most important difference a higher emission of terpenes (epizonaren, α-gurjunene, β-elemene) emitted by toxigenic strains.

A combination of potential biomarkers has been identified for the development of the future molecular fingerprint sensor.

The next step is to study the VOCs when the fungi grow on the stored grain according to the parameters related to the in vivo conditions. And confirm the correlation between specific VOCs and mycotoxin production.