Cereal Chem. 71:16-20   |  VIEW ARTICLE


Adsorption of Volatile Fungal Metabolites to Wheat Grains and Subsequent Desorption.

T. Borjesson, U. Stollman, and J. Schnurer. Copyright 1994 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. 

Adsorption of the volatile fungal metabolites 2-methylfuran, 3-methyl-1-butanol, and 1-octen-3-ol to wheat grains, and their subsequent desorption, were investigated. Adsorption was performed both dynamically and statically. In the dynamic system, volatile compounds in a N2 flow were led through 400 g of wheat in a glass column. In the static system, 400 g of wheat was stored in an airtight glass vessel containing the volatile compounds in the atmosphere. Three desorption procedures were compared: an N2 flow at 20 C, an N2 flow at 50 C, and extraction with supercritical CO2. 3-Methyl-1-butanol and 1-octen-3-ol were efficiently adsorbed and could also readily be desorbed to considerably higher extents at 50 C than at 20 C. The supercritical CO2 extraction was more efficient than N2 desorption in extracting volatile compounds, but because of the smaller sample sizes (1 g), the amounts extracted per gram of grain were lower than the amounts extracted with N2 desorption at 50 C. The adsorbed amount of each volatile compound was calculated as the difference between content in the N2 stream before passage through the wheat and its content after passage. Desorption by means of a N2 stream led to the recovery of about 5% of 2- methylfuran, 35% of 3-methyl-1-butanol, and 100% of 1-octen-3-ol.