Chemical Forums
Chemistry Forums for Students => Organic Chemistry Forum => Topic started by: BioDome1996 on October 10, 2013, 06:32:42 PM
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Pretty simple question dealing with aflatoxins from Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus.
Would these at all be applicable to my question? I am trying to definitely find out whether ethanol extraction would leave the aflatoxins in the source material.
Ethanol Production
Aflatoxins do not appear in distilled alcohol, even when
the corn has relatively high levels of toxin. The toxins are
not degraded during fermentation and distillation but
simply are concentrated in the spent grain. Thus, ethanol
plants can utilize aflatoxin-contaminated corn, although
they may prefer not to, because of a desire to use the spent
grain as livestock feed.
http://www2.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/id/id59/id59.pdf
Alcohol. Aflatoxin contaminated corn could be utilized to produce alcohol for the production of gasohol. In fact, some has been utilized in this process. However, the residue from such a process remains contaminated with aflatoxins and should not be fed to livestock unless it is decontaminated. Apparently, the aflatoxins do not interfere with the fermentation process in producing alcohol.
http://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/NCH/NCH-52.html
Commercial processing of cottonseed requires hexane to extract and recover edible oil. Gossypol and aflatoxin are not removed from extracted meals. A bench-top extraction process with 95% (vol/vol) aqueous ethanol (EtOH) solvent has been developed that extracts all three of the above materials with a much less volatile solvent. In this process, cottonseed is pretreated and extracted with ambient 95% EtOH to remove gossypol and then extracted with hot 95% EtOH to extract oil and aflatoxin. Membranes and adsorption columns are used to purify the various extract streams, so that they can be recycled directly. A representative extracted meal contained a total gossypol content of 0.47% (a 70% reduction) and 3 ppb aflatoxin (a 95% reduction). Residual oil content was approximately 2%.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02540523
Go to page 15 of the PDF, or Page 345 of the source material, and look for "Removal by Extraction"
http://pac.iupac.org/publications/pac/pdf/1970/pdf/2103x0331.pdf
And on Page 21 of the PDF, or Page 351 of the source material, it states:
Extraction with certain solvents to achieve essentially complete removal of aflatoxins is also technically feasible.
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Cold ethanol may very well extract them, then obviously do not appear in any distillate.
Cold water as well, and some of them exhibit transdermal properties, very nasty compounds