Cereal corps especially wheat, barley, and corn are contaminated by mould easily in daily life. Deoxynivalenol (DON), one of the most prevalent mycotoxin produced by the mould, has brought about an increasing food safety issue worldwide.

Researchers in the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISA) applied pigs as models to investigate the harm of mycotoxin to humans, since the physiological index of the pig and human are alike. First, they housed 24 growing pigs and randomly assigned to receive diets containing 0, 3, 6, or 12 mg DON/kg feed for 21 days. The common parameters of body involved growth performance, serum biochemical were measured to investigate the healthy status of all pigs. Then they hypothesized that the adverse effects of DON contaminated diets on growth performance of growing pigs may primarily cause by impairing absorption of nutrients in gut. Thus the amino acid profile, jejunal morphology, and the mRNA expression of genes for nutrient transporters in gut were tested.

Findings of their research showed that the contaminated feeds aroused a mass of effects in a dose-dependent manner, including weight loss, live injury and oxidation stress. Several parameters of blood including alkaline phosphatase, superoxide dismutase, and glutathione peroxidase were markedly decreased, suggesting that the defense function of body was destroyed by the exposure to DON increasingly. The villi height of gut and the mRNA expression of glucose and amino acid transporters which serves to absorb these nutrition were markedly decreased suggesting that the absorption, assimilation function of gut was ruin too. In conclusion, feeding DON-contaminated diets to growing pigs may be harm for the antioxidant and digestive system which ultimately suppressed the healthy development of growing pigs. Their hypothesis was borne out.

This research was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2013CB127301), Key project of the natural science foundation of Hunan province (12JJ2014), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31402088, 31330075 and 31201813).

The study entitled “Growth performance, serum biochemical profile, jejjunal morphology, and the expression of nutrients transporter genes in deoxynivalenol-challenged growing pigs” has been published on Veterinary Research. Details could be found at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1746-6148/11/144