Cold Plasma Degradation of Aflatoxin M1 in Milk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aflatoxins (AFB1, AFB2, AFG1, AFG2) are toxins that are produced by two common molds, Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus. These toxins are teratogenic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic. In dairy cows, ingested AFB1 found in moldy grain is metabolized into Aflatoxin M1 (AFM1), which is then deposited in the milk. This presents a health risk for consumers, especially in developing countries, where AFM1 concentrations in milk can be 100 times higher than the FDA safety limit of 0.5 ppb. Existing methods of milk processing, such as ultra-high temperature (UHT) processing, do not significantly reduce AFM1. A promising new technology is high-voltage atmospheric cold plasma (HVACP). The goal of this research is to evaluate the potential for HVACP to reduce AFM1 in contaminated milk and evaluate its impact on milk quality. Artificially contaminated milk samples were prepared with an AFM1 concentration of 1.00 ppb and treated at 90 kV for up to five minutes in a working gas of modified air (MA65: 65% O2, 30% CO2, 5% N2). An 81% minimum reduction in AFM1 was observed for all samples after three minutes of HVACP direct treatment and 4.0 hours of post-treatment refrigerated storage. No significant differences among protein, fat, and lactose contents were found between the cold plasma-treated samples and control samples. However, the color of whole milk showed a slight increase in lightness. The concentration of nitrite, nitrate, and hydrogen peroxide in treated samples was 0 ppm, 2.5 ppm, and 40 ppm respectively for whole milk and 0 ppm, 2.5 ppm, and 37.5 ppm for skim milk. It is worth noting that residual levels of nitrite, nitrate, and peroxide in treated samples are below safety thresholds. After HVACP treatment, three main degradants of AFM1 were identified with the chemical formulas of C15H11O7, C17H15O9, and C15H13O7. These results demonstrate a few minutes of HVACP direct treatment in MA65 gas is sufficient to reduce AFM1 concentration in milk without significantly impacting quality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".