Instant Catapult Steam Explosion: A rapid technique for detoxification of aflatoxin-contaminated biomass for sustainable utilization as animal feed

Instant Catapult Steam Explosion (ICSE) is a rapid and effective technique with ability to reduce the toxic compound and improve the cellulose digestibility of lignocellulosic biomass. It has beneficial feature of very short explosion time (<0.1 s) and high explosion power density (400–1000 order of magnitude density) compared to conventional explosion. In this study, ICSE was examined for its potential to degrade aflatoxin B₁ (AFB₁) in corn stalk in order to improve its utilization as a toxic-free animal feed. Incubation of AFB1-containing corn stalk followed by processing with ICSE at 2.4 MPa led to approximately 100% degradation of AFB₁ in 140 s of process time. The degradation of AFB₁ by ICSE led to generation of 5 products including C₁₇H₈O₆ (m/z 308), C₁₇H₁₄O₆ (m/z 314), C₁₆H₈O₅ (m/z 280), C₁₇H₁₄O₇ (m/z 330) and C₁₇H₁₆O₉ (m/z 364). Two degradation pathways were proposed and the first one involved hydrolysis, oxidation and dehydrogenation while the second consisted of dehydrogenation and decarbonylation. The toxicity of these products were found to be substantially less than that possessed by AFB₁. The study demonstrates that ICSE shows great promise as a rapid technique to detoxify aflatoxin-contaminated biomass for sustainable and safe utilization of agricultural biomass as animal feed. Copyright © 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.