A method to measure proteolytic activity of Fusarium sp. in wheat flours

Abstract

There are types of Fusarium contaminated flours that, despite containing low levels of toxins, are not suitable for breadmaking because their content of fungal proteases that degraded flour’s proteins and can therfore reduce its breadmaking properties. In Fusarium contaminated flours there are cereal and fungal proteases. It is therfore important to obtain a method to measure the fungal protease activity only. We compare here the proteolytic activity of Fusarium contaminated and not contaminated flours to optimize the conditions to discriminate the fungal proteolytic activity. The method presented here validates because of the obtained high correlation (r=0.972 p ≤ 0.01) between proteolytic activity and flour contamination.