Aspergillus from Grapes: Ochratoxin A Risk in Relation to Climate Change and New Strategies for Reducing Contamination

With the present PhD project we studied the impact of combined climate change factors (i.e. increasing temperature, water stress and elevated CO2 concentrations) on the ecophysiology, OTA production and the expression of key toxin genes by Aspergillus carbonarius, which is considered the main responsible of OTA contamination in grapes.Moreover, it has been evaluated the possibility to develop new strategies to reduce the risk of OTA contamination by exploiting the already reported ability of Aspergillus species to degrade the toxin (Bejaoui et al., 2005; Gallo et al., 2012). The ultimate aim, is to identify and characterize proteases responsible of OTA degradation.