Sammendrag
Cereal grain contaminated by Fusarium mycotoxins is undesirable in food and feed because
of the harmful health effects of the mycotoxins in humans and animals. Reduction of mycotoxin
content in grain by cleaning and size sorting has mainly been studied in wheat. We investigated
whether the removal of small kernels by size sorting could be a method to reduce the content of
mycotoxins in oat grain. Samples from 24 Norwegian mycotoxin-contaminated grain lots (14 from
2015 and 10 from 2018) were sorted by a laboratory sieve (sieve size 2.2 mm) into large and small kernel
fractions and, in addition to unsorted grain samples, analyzed with LC-MS-MS for quantification
of 10 mycotoxins. By removing the small kernel fraction (on average 15% and 21% of the weight
of the samples from the two years, respectively), the mean concentrations of HT-2+T-2 toxins were
reduced by 56% (from 745 to 328 µg/kg) in the 2015 samples and by 32% (from 178 to 121 µg/kg) in
the 2018 samples. Deoxynivalenol (DON) was reduced by 24% (from 191 to 145 µg/kg) in the 2018
samples, and enniatin B (EnnB) by 44% (from 1059 to 594 µg/kg) in the 2015 samples. Despite low
levels, our analyses showed a trend towards reduced content of DON, ADON, NIV, EnnA, EnnA1,
EnnB1 and BEA after removing the small kernel fraction in samples from 2015. For several of the
mycotoxins, the concentrations were considerably higher in the small kernel fraction compared to
unsorted grain. Our results demonstrate that the level of mycotoxins in unprocessed oat grain can be
reduced by removing small kernels. We assume that our study is the first report on the effect of size
sorting on the content of enniatins (Enns), NIV and BEA in oat grains.
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