Nutrition : Vitamins and Minerals

In spite of all efforts to prevent formation of mycotoxins significant contaminations still occur. Contaminated grain or feed ingredients may encounter livestock health problems or poor animal performance because they can have chronic and acute effects on animals. By now, the worldwide most applied method to protect animals against mycotoxin-related diseases and to avoid carryover of mycotoxins into animal products is the use of non-nutritive sorbents in the diet which are supposed to tightly bind and immobilize mycotoxins in the gastrointestinal tract, resulting in a major reduction of toxin bio-availability. HSCAS, the most extensively studied adsorbent, was demonstrated to be very effective with regard to preventing aflatoxicosis, however, its efficacy against zearalenone and ochratoxin A was limited and in the case of trichothecenes it was practically zero. The objective of this study was to evaluate binder and a microbiological for detoxification in vitro and in vivo. The in vitro experiments showed that natural binders bound ochratoxin up to 80% at pH 3 whereas the binding at pH 6.5 was very poor. In contrast to that many of the processed binders could deactivate OTA to a very high extend independently from the pH-value. Two of these organoclays were tested separately in experiments with broiler chickens. The addition of ochratoxin A to the diet of broilers led to impaired performance parameters. Surprisingly the application of organoclays further decreased the production efficiency factor (EEF). In contrast to that the use of a OTA-cleaving yeast (BiominMTV) resulted in an improvement of EEF. The experiments revealed that adsorbents are not useful for deactivating ochratoxin A in animal feed. Organoclays which showed very good binding capabilities in vitro did not work in in vivo experiments. The reason for this might be the binding of vitamins and other essential nutrients due to an alteration of the binding properties of processed minerals from specific to unspecific binding. In contrast to binders the addition of a new yeast strain (BiominMTV) to the diet led to a detoxification of ochratoxin A.