Cereal Chem 48:385 - 391.  |  VIEW ARTICLE
Laboratory Wet-Milling of Corn Containing High Levels of Aflatoxin and a Survey of Commercial Wet-Milling Products.

K. R. Yahl, S. A. Watson, R. J. Smith, and R. Barabolok. Copyright 1971 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. 

Corn was inoculated with spores of Aspergillus flavus and allowed to incubate until mold growth was observed. This corn was found to contain 638 p.p.b. aflatoxin B1. This sample and a naturally contaminated sample (120 p.p.b. B1) were steeped and wet-milled by a laboratory procedure. Aflatoxin was found primarily in steepwater (39-42%) and fiber (30-38%), with the remainder in gluten (14-17%) and germ (6- 10%). Increases in concentrations of aflatoxin in the fractions compared with the original corn were steepwater, 4- to 5-fold; fiber, 2.5- to 3-fold; gluten, 1- to 1.5-fold; and germ, 1-fold. The starch fractions had aflatoxin levels of 9.0 and 2.2 p.p.b. and hence contained only about 1% of the toxin originally in the corn. Analyses of 105 samples of commercial corn steepwater produced at 6 individual plants over a period of 1 to 3 months during new corn movement gave negative aflatoxin results in all cases. Assays of a number of production samples of starch, germ, gluten, and gluten feed were all negative. Analytical procedures gave sensitivities of 1 to 3 p.p.b. of aflatoxin B1.