Mycotoxins are toxic fungal metabolites that cause intoxication when consumed by animals, including humans. Fungi that produce mycotoxins are called toxigenic fungi. The toxigenic fungi do not produce mycotoxins after they have been ingested by animals and humans. Toxigenic fungi grow in corn, cereals, soybeans, sorghum, peanuts, silage and other food, feed crops or hay in the field, and in gra...

We evaluated a new automated homogeneous PCR assay to detect toxigenic Clostridium difficile, the GenomEra C. difficile assay (Abacus Diagnostica, Finland), with 310 diarrheal stool specimens and with a collection of 33 known clostridial and nonclostridial isolates. Results were compared with toxigenic culture results, with discrepancies being resolved by the GeneXpert C. difficile PCR assay (C...

Several atoxigenic Aspergillus flavus isolates, including some being used as biocontrol agents, and one toxigenic isolate were surveyed for the ability to produce extracellular xylanolytic and pectinolytic hydrolases. All of the tested isolates displayed good production of endoxylanases when grown on a medium utilizing larch xylan as a sole carbon substrate. Four of the tested isolates produced...

Fusarium equiseti and Fusarium acuminatum are toxigenic species that contaminate cereal crops from diverse climatic regions. They are common in Spanish cereals. The information available on their phylogenetics and toxigenic profiles is, however, insufficient to assist risk evaluation. In this work, phylogenetic analyses were performed using partial sequences of the translation elongation factor...

Of 97 strains of Vibrio cholerae isolated from various seafoods in Malaysia in 1998 and 1999, 20 strains carried the ctx gene and produced cholera toxin. Fourteen, one, and five of these toxigenic strains belonged to the O139, O1 Ogawa, and rough serotypes, respectively. The rough strains had the rfb gene of the O1 serotype. The toxigenic strains varied in their biochemical characteristics, the...

Biological control of preharvest aflatoxin contamination by atoxigenic stains of Aspergillus flavus has been demonstrated in several crops. The assumption is that some form of competition suppresses the fungus's ability to infect or produce aflatoxin when challenged. Intraspecific aflatoxin inhibition was demonstrated by others. This work investigates the mechanistic basis of that phenomenon. A...

We examined the incremental yield of stool culture (with toxin testing on isolates) versus our two-step algorithm for optimal detection of toxigenic Clostridium difficile. Per the two-step algorithm, stools were screened for C. difficile-associated glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) antigen and, if positive, tested for toxin by a direct (stool) cell culture cytotoxicity neutralization assay (CCNA). ...