Abstract:Mycotoxins are a group of secondary metabolites produced by fungi during their growth. Mycotoxins not only seriously affect the yield of food crops, but also pose big threat to human health. There are various physical treatments for mycotoxins including cleaning, peeling, exposure, irradiation, ion pulse and so on, however, these physical methods are difficult to ensure complete removal of toxins. Also, the loss of nutrients in crops would be possibly caused during the physical treatment. Chemical methods can also eliminate mycotoxins to some extent, but the introduction of chemical reagents and the potential indirect contamination can limit the further application in practical field. With a continuous development of biotechnology, microbial enzymes have shown great advantages in the degradation of mycotoxins due to the mild reaction conditions, high degradation efficiency and low toxicity of degradation products. The discovery, identification and application of mycotoxin-degrading enzymes which have been reported so far were thoroughly reviewed in this manuscript. It is believed that with the deepening of research, the mycotoxin-degrading enzymes are expected to be further developed and employed in the feed and food industries.
