Fluctuation in the ergosterol and deoxynivalenol content in barley and malt during malting process

This paper describes determination of the deoxynivalenol and ergosterol in samples from different varieties of barley and, consequently, malt produced from this barley. In total, 20 samples of barley and 20 samples of barley malt were analyzed. The alkaline hydrolysis with consequent extraction into hexane was applied to obtain the ergosterol from cereals. Extraction to acetonitrile/water and subsequent solid-phase extraction (SPE) were used for deoxynivalenol. The determination of the samples was performed on high-performance liquid chromatography using UV detection (ergosterol) and mass spectrometric detection (deoxynivalenol). The influence of the malting process on the production of two compounds of interest was assessed from obtained results. Ergosterol concentration ranged 0.88–15.87 mg/kg in barley and 2.63–34.96 mg/kg in malt, where its content increased to 95% compared to samples before malting. The malting process was observed as having a significant effect on ergosterol concentration (P = 0.07). The maximum concentration of deoxynivalenol was found to be 641 μg/kg in barley and 499 μg/kg in malt. Its concentration was lower than the legislative limit for unprocessed cereals (1,250 μg/kg). The statistic effect of the malting process on deoxynivalenol production was not found. Linear correlation between ergosterol and deoxynivalenol content was found to be very low (barley R = 0.02, malt R = 0.01). The results revealed that it is not possible to consider the ergosterol content as the indicator of deoxynivalenol contamination of naturally molded samples.