Abdolhassan Kazemi - Bio-Medical Ethician (Fellowship), Molecular Biologist and Genetic engineer (PhD). Professor and Dean of Philosophy and History Research Center. Tabriz Uni. of Med. Sci., Tabriz, Iran.

A wide range of various mycotoxins are secondary metabolites produced by moulds and have acute toxicities and usually quite widespread in foods and feeds or in the raw materials used in their production, and some of them may pass through the food chain to commodities which have not been contaminated by moulds. Some of mycotoxins are associated with acute or chronic syndromes such as carcinogenicity and immunosuppression.Some of mycotoxins of most public health, food safety and agro-economic importance include aflatoxins (AF), ochratoxins (OT), zearalenone (ZEN), trichothecenes, Patulin and fumonisins (F). Patulin, fumonisins and ochratoxin have been recognized as potentially important food contaminants for many decades and have been considered as possibly carcinogenic in the past but, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) have now classified them as a possible human carcinogen and a number of agencies have set permitted total daily intakes. Also, one of the most recent groups of mycotoxins to be recognized is the fomonisins produced by Fusarium moniliforme and related species. They are certainly associated with equine encephalomalacia, porcine pulmonary oedema, hepatic cancer and they have cancer-promoting activity in some laboratory tests.Ochratoxin’s structure is a derivative of L-phenylalanine makes it a potent inhibitor of phenylalanine tRNA synthetase and it is possible thet the inhibition of the biosythesis of a specific group of phenylalanine rich protein. Aflatoxin group of mycotoxins, also, have been considered as a carcinogenic toxins and many researches pointed out that there was a significant correlation between liver cancer, exposure to aflatoxins and to hepatitis b virus, itself implicated in the epidemiology of liver carcinoma. For some animal species, such as the rat and the rainbow trout, aflatoxin B1, is among the most potent chemical carcinogens. Aflatoxin B1 epioxide is known to react with guanine residues of DNA and it is guanine at position three in codon 249 of the tumor suppressor p53 gene which is a mutational hotspot associated with human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)

Mycotoxin, Food contamination, Food safety, Cancer