Aims and concerns of the chapter:
We propose to describe somehow the information generated in the aflatoxins field in the past decade on the basis of an exhaustive categorization of the publications retrieved by entering the keyword "aflatoxin" in the PubMed search engine of the US National Library of Medicine web page, a database of biomedical literature widely used around the world.
More than 2000 publications will be categorized according to the following initial criteria:
- Number of works published every year through the period.
- Country where the work was carried out.
- Format of the publication (original research, reviews?)
For the topics previously mentioned, it is expected to get conclusions arising from the evaluation of the full period as well as from every year through the period.
Then, the information retrieved from PubMed would be further analyzed having in mind the focusing of the research. It will be determined the percentage of publications referred to:
- Cereals (will be also divided into those focused to study the molecular basis of susceptibility or resistance to fungal infection and aflatoxin contamination, for instance).
- Fungus (will be also divided into those that assessed the fungal ecophysiology, the fungal cell biology, the regulation of secondary metabolism, the biological functions of the afatoxins, etc).
- Foodstuffs (the information will be also divided into publications related to the prevention of contamination with aflatoxins, surveys on mycoflora and contamination with aflatoxins, development and validation of methods for detection and quantification of aflatoxins in various matrices, evaluation of strategies for detoxification, etc.).
- Toxicological studies (the publications will be classified into: studies of aflatoxins metabolism and its modulation by chemicals, studies about the toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic of aflatoxins, prevention of aflatoxin toxicity, trials aimed to detect probable relationships between aflatoxins exposure and conditions such as cancer, for instance).
This proposal will provide some tools to characterize the behavior of the research in the field of aflatoxins during the last decade.
