Another noteworthy contribution is the first report of the widespread occurrence of NIV in commercial wheat grain in southern Brazil. Previous report of NIV in Brazilian wheat was limited to 20 samples from a one-field experiment carried out in 1990, with two wheat varieties in the state of São Paulo (Furlong et al., 1995). While in that study NIV was detected in three samples (160–400 μg/kg), and DON in four samples (470–590 μg/kg), F. graminearum was not identified among the Fusarium species isolated from the samples. Natural occurrence of NIV in South America was reported in wheat grain samples from fields grown in southwestern Buenos Aires province

of Argentina, during 2001 and 2002 growing seasons. In that work, contrastingly, only two out find more of 19 samples contained NIV in relatively lower

concentrations compared to DON (Pinto et al., 2008). NIV is a common toxin found in other production regions of the world, especially in Asia, where NIV genotypes are present and/or predominate over DON types (Suga et al., 2008 and Zhang et al., 2007). In Japan, there have been many reports selleck of DON and NIV co-contamination in domestic wheat and barley by-products (Tanaka et al., 2010 and Yoshizawa and Jin, 1995) and both toxins are targets in FHB control studies (Nakajima, 2007). Our findings place Brazil in a similar situation as in Asia and other regions, especially because of the toxigenic potential of the regional fungal populations. The NIV levels found in our work,

although not exceeding 1000 μg/kg, are of great toxicological significance given the higher toxicity of NIV compared to DON. The lack of detection of NIV in surveys conducted in Brazil for may relate to a number of factors including non-consideration of NIV as a target toxin, lower frequency of NIV genotypes or lack of specific methodology for its detection. The finding of NIV in commercial grain links to results of our molecular surveillance on Fg populations in southern Brazil where potential NIV-producers (NIV genotypes) were detected together with the most predominant DON-type (15ADON genotype) (Astolfi et al., 2011, Astolfi et al., 2011 and Scoz et al., 2009). The relatively high NIV levels found in samples of this survey compared to a proportionally lower number of NIV-type strains relative to DON-type, in wheat, suggest that other factors, such as host genotype, environment, and field populations may play a significant role in the production of NIV in the field, which deserves further investigation. In Argentina, although 15ADON genotypes are most prevalent, a recent molecular survey revealed the occurrence of NIV genotype with a distinct phylogenetic species profile (Sampietro et al., 2010), suggesting the need to increase vigilance to detect movement and changes in the chemotype distribution, especially because of the proximity to production regions in Brazil.