Determination of Fungi and Aflatoxin Contaminating Wheat Stored in Silos of Salah Al-Den Governorate–Iraq

Abstract

The study was conducted in the laboratories of Food Sciences Department in College of Agriculture at Tikrit University with the aim of isolating and diagnosing of fungalspecies which contaminated the wheat samples that stored in the silos of Salah Al-Din Governorate, The samples were included T1:local wheat from the Sharqat silo, T2: local wheat from the Al-Alamsilo, T3: imported wheat From Tikrit silo, T4:Wheat imported from Al-Sharqat silo. The fungal was isolation by inoculation the wheat samples after dilution with saline on the media of potato dextrose agar (PDA), Czapek Dox agar and Rose Bengal agar, and incubated on 30 ºC for 5 days then diagnosis used the morphological and microscopic characterized and confirming using specific primer in the PCR technique.

The results showed the diagnosis of the species of fungi contaminated with stored wheat, whether imported or locally used in the production of flour, which was supplied within the ration card items, which were the species Aspergillus flavus, A.niger, A.parasiticus, Peniciliumexpansum, and Rhizopusstolinifer, as their accounts were the total logarithmic in the samples. T1, T2, T3, and T4 are at logs of 6.72, 6.66, 6.78 and 6.70 colonies/g, respectively, and A. flavus prevailed with a frequency rate of 45.5, 51.3, 37.1 and 41.2%, respectively, also the AFIR2 gene was appeared at 500 bp. The aflatoxin B1 were detected in the wheat samples at 192, 169.6, 100,8 and 100 µg/g respectively.