Detection of Mycotoxins and Aflatoxigenic Fungi Associated with Compound Poultry Feedstuffs in Saudi Arabia.

Poultry feeds with cereal grain-based constituents are vulnerable to fungal contamination during the processing and storage stages. A total of 100 samples of compound poultry feedstuffs were collected from the cities of Riyadh, Alhassa, Qassim, and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. A quantitative enumeration of fungal colony-forming units (CFUs) was performed on Dichloran Rose Bengal Chloramphenicol Agar (DRBC) and Czapek Iprodione Dichloran Agar (CZID) media. Aspergillus flavus was the most predominant species, accounting for 18.714 × 103 and 3.956 × 103 CFU/g, with frequencies of 84 and 42% in the feed samples on DRBC and CZID media, respectively. The levels of different mycotoxins were estimated by the HPLC technique. One hundred percent of the compound poultry feedstuff samples were contaminated by mycotoxins such as AFB1, AFB2, AFG1, AFG2, FB1, DON, T2, OTA, and ZEN. Aflatoxins were recorded in 84% of the tested samples, of which 70 samples were contaminated by AFB1, ranging from 0.03 to 0.40 μg/kg. The aflatoxin analysis of the fungal species revealed that 89% and 100% of A. flavus and A. parasiticus isolates were aflatoxigenic, and all of them exhibited the presence of the aflR, omt-1, ver-1, and nor-1 genes. According to the PCR protocol based on FLA1, two primers were successful in directly and rapidly detecting A. flavus in the poultry feedstuff samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]