Detoxification kinetics of naturally occurring and spiked ochratoxin-A in ground wheat by atmospheric pressure cold plasma

This study aimed to investigate the detoxification efficiency and degradation kinetics of ochratoxin-A (OTA) in ground wheat subjected to atmospheric pressure cold plasma (APCP). The APCP process for varying exposure times was applied to three different contamination conditions: ground wheat sample naturally contaminated with OTA, ground wheat sample artificially spiked with the toxin, and pure OTA standard solution. In this context, OTA levels were precisely quantified post-treatment using HPLC-MS/MS, the degradation kinetics were modeled employing the Weibull function, and the potential effects of the APCP treatment on the physicochemical properties of wheat were evaluated. According to the results, APCP treatment significantly reduced OTA concentrations in all matrices. However, the highest degradation was achieved in the standard OTA solution (70.3 %), followed by naturally contaminated wheat (52.0 %) and spiked sample (40.3 %), highlighting that matrix complexity influenced APCP efficiency. Furthermore, short-term APCP treatment (4–8 min) did not cause a significant change in the nutritional composition of wheat (p < 0.05). Overall, the study demonstrated that spiked OTA samples can provide a reliable model for assessing plasma-assisted detoxification, while emphasizing the critical role of toxin incorporation mode when evaluating APCP performance in food matrices.