Cottonseed borne fungi were isolated from five cotton (Gossypium barbadense L.) cultivars; Giza-80, Giza-86, Giza-88, Giza-90 and Giza-92. Alternaria spp., Aspergillus flavus, A. niger, Aspergillus spp. Fusarium spp., Penicillium spp., Rhizopus stolonifer and Trichoderma spp. were occurred in both non-strilized and sterilized seeds. A. niger was generally the most predominant fungus with isolation frequency range of 20.95% to 73.17%. Mycotoxin analysis were performed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). HPLC analysis of cottonseed revealed the presence of mycotoxins that were varied according to storage periods and genotypes. Significant correlations between the frequency of isolated fungi and the mycotoxin production was recorded in this study. Seven models were constructed using the predictors supplied by stepwise regression with R² values ranged from 0.433 to 0.578%. Since the stepwise multiple regression was effectively constructed 7 predictive models; this study suggested that the contents of some mycotoxins in cotton seeds could be predicated depending on the fungal isolation frequencies.
HPLC, Gossypium barbadense, Mycotoxins, Storage
© The Author(s) 2014. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.