The occurrence of deoxynivalenol (DON) in animal feed is a serious issue for the livestock industry. Approaches using mycotoxin adsorbents are key to decreasing mycotoxin carryover from contaminated feed to animals. In this paper, a novel functional microsphere adsorbent comprising an alginate/carboxymethyl cellulose sodium composite loaded with calcium (SA/CMC-Ca) was prepared by an emulsification process to adsorb DON from polluted corn steep liquor (CSL) containing DON at a concentration of 3.60 μg/mL. Batch experiments were conducted under different experimental conditions: CSL volumes, reaction times, desorption times, and microsphere recyclability. Results showed that 5 g of microspheres reacted with 5 mL of DON-polluted CSL for 5 min, the microspheres can be recycled 155 times, and the maximum DON adsorption for the microspheres was 2.34 μg/mL. During recycling, microspheres were regenerated by deionized water every time; after the microspheres were cleaned, DON in the deionized water was degraded by sodium hydroxide (NaOH) at 70 °C for 1 h at pH 12. The mechanism for physical adsorption and hydrogen bonding was analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report showing that the microsphere adsorbent SA/CMC-Ca adsorbs DON. Therefore, we suggest that using microsphere absorbents would be a possible way to address DON-contaminated CSL issues in animal feed.
Keywords: adsorption; calcium chloride; carboxymethylcellulose; corn steep liquor; deoxynivalenol; sodium alginate; sodium hydroxide.