ABSTRACT
Owing to the intrinsic factors and some extrinsic environmental conditions, many foods, agricultural products and Chinese materia medicas (CMMs), if not handled properly in the processes of growth, harvesting, processing and storage, can be easily contaminated by all kinds of molds to produce mycotoxins of serious toxicity, which will not only affect the quality, safety and effectiveness of CMMs, but also result in potential threatens to human and animal's health and life. Therefore, in recent decades, it has become the focus on how to prevent and control the foods, agricultural products and CMMs from being moldy and producing toxicity for scientific preservation. Many Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) especially those with high content of volatile oils with strong antifungal activities have been applied for the scientific preservation of foods, agricultural products and CMMs. Based on these situations, natural anti-mildew agents have been further developed and made into some useful dosage forms, such as tablets, aerosol, liposomes and inclusion, which will not only greatly expand the application scope of CHMs to make the use of anti-mildew agents more convenient, but also achieve the sustained or controlled release of the antifungal effect for scientific preservation of foods, agricultural products and CMMs.
ABSTRACT
Ochratoxin A (OTA) is a toxic secondary metabolite mainly produced by Aspergillus and Penicillium species, with strong renal toxicity, teratogenic, carcinogenic, mutagenic effect. Studies have shown that OTA is not only widely contaminated in food and feed crops, but also has been widely contaminated in Chinese herbal medicines such as spices, licorice and so on. In view of OTA's universality and harmfulness, this paper summarizes the flow visualization test strip, microsphere, electrochemical sensor, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy technology in OTA rapid detection, which provides reference for the research and application of high throughout detection instrument miniaturization in order to achieve OTA quick detection and simple operation.
ABSTRACT
Chinese medicinal materials (CMMs) are easily to be contaminated by all kinds of molds to produce various mycotoxins due to their internal factors and the external environmental conditions during the growth, harvesting, processing, and especially storage processes. This will not only affect the quality of CMMs, resulting in enormous financial loss, but also influence the safety and effectiveness of CMMs, posing potential threats to human health. With the increase in awareness of "traditional Chinese medicine health" idea, more and more attention has been paid on how to prevent and control these CMMs from being mouldy to guarantee their safety. Some physical and chemical techniques have been restricted for protecting CMMs due to their own disadvantages. As a green, safe and economic strategy for the preservation of CMMs, "couplet medicine" technique based on the principle of "protecting CMM with another CMM" has been developed: two kinds of CMMs are stored together and fight against each other to prevent mildew metamorphism, exhibiting no obvious changes in color, smell and quality. Nowadays, certain application results have been obtained for the "antagonistic storage" method based on the above mode and principle. In this paper, we would review and discuss the mechanism, practical application and the problems of "couplet medicine" technique, and provide scientific evidences for developing safe and effective tools to protect CMMs from being mouldy.