Mycotoxins and Fungal Threats in a Warming World: Climate-Driven Risks, Detection, Prediction, and Mitigation Across Agro-Food Systems

Climate change is reshaping the ecology, distribution, seasonality, and infection dynamics of fungi that contaminate food and feed systems worldwide. Rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, elevated CO₂ levels, and more frequent extreme events (e.g., droughts, floods, heatwaves) are transforming agro-ecosystems and influencing crop–fungus interactions. These changes can affect host susceptibility and create conditions that favor fungal colonization and mycotoxin biosynthesis. As a result, contamination risks may expand into new regions, shift in their temporal dynamics, and increase the likelihood of multi-mycotoxin co-occurrence across commodities.Mycotoxins remain a persistent food safety challenge, as contamination is often not detectable by visual inspection, many may persist, at least partially, through processing, and can lead to acute and chronic health effects in humans and animals. Beyond health impacts, mycotoxin contamination drives food losses, reduces feed efficiency and livestock productivity, disrupts trade, and exacerbates food insecurity—particularly where climate vulnerability intersects with limited capacity for monitoring, storage infrastructure, and risk management.Addressing these challenges requires an integrated and multidisciplinary approach that combines mechanistic understanding of fungal ecology and mycotoxin biosynthesis with predictive modelling, advanced analytical tools, and scalable mitigation strategies.This Research Topic brings together high-quality contributions that advance our understanding of how a warming world is changing fungal and mycotoxin threats across the agro-food chain. While mycotoxin contamination remains a central focus, the Topic also welcomes studies addressing climate-driven fungal dynamics, even when mycotoxins are not directly measured in the study, provided they demonstrate clear relevance to contamination risk, food and feed safety, or exposure pathways.In this context, the Topic integrates knowledge spanning fields to post-harvest systems, including storage, transport, and distribution environments. It also covers analytical advances, modelling, surveillance, mitigation, and governance approaches to better characterize contamination pathways, identify emerging risks, and evaluate effective intervention strategies.By fostering interdisciplinary perspectives, this Topic supports the development of predictive and evidence-based approaches for monitoring and managing mycotoxin contamination under evolving environmental conditions. Ultimately, it informs practical and scalable solutions that enhance food and feed safety, strengthen climate resilience, and support sustainable agro-food systems at regional and global scales.The collection welcomes original research, reviews, perspectives, and methods or policy contributions from researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working at the interface of food safety, climate adaptation, plant pathology, fungal ecophysiology, post-harvest systems, exposure science, and risk assessment.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Climate-driven shifts in the distribution, prevalence, and key toxigenic fungal groups (including species and strains within Aspergillus, Fusarium, Penicillium, Alternaria, Claviceps) across crops, feeds, and food systems.• Effects of environmental and substrate-related factors (temperature, drought, flooding, water activity, and elevated CO₂) on fungal growth, infection dynamics, and mycotoxin biosynthesis.• Impacts of crop stress, pest pressure, and plant–microbe interactions on contamination risk, including integrated pest and disease management strategies under climate-driven conditions.• Occurrence, co-occurrence, and emerging or modified mycotoxins across field and post-harvest systems under changing agro-ecological conditions.• Surveillance and sampling strategies for heterogeneous contamination, including challenges related to uncertainty, representativeness, and methodological harmonization.• Advances in detection and monitoring of mycotoxins, including multi-mycotoxin LC–MS/MS methods, high-resolution and non-targeted approaches, omics-based profiling, rapid and field-deployable diagnostics (e.g., biosensors, spectroscopy), and validation in real-world contexts.• Predictive modelling, early-warning systems, and risk mapping using climate data, GIS, and remote sensing, as well as decision-support tools for farmers, storage operators, and regulators.• Prevention and mitigation strategies across the value chain, including climate-smart agronomy, microbial biocontrol approaches (antagonistic bacteria, yeasts, and atoxigenic strains), resistant crop varieties, improved drying and storage systems, and processing or detoxification strategies.• Feed safety interventions, including binders and detoxifying agents, with emphasis on efficacy, safety, and performance under diverse diets and production systems, including implications for integrated food/feed exposure assessment and carry-over into animal-derived foods.• Exposure assessment, biomonitoring, and risk assessment approaches addressing mixtures, vulnerable populations, and One Health linkages across human, animal, and environmental systems.• Socioeconomic, equity, and policy dimensions of climate-driven mycotoxin risks, including trade impacts, cost-effectiveness of interventions, capacity-building needs, and adaptive food safety governance.This Research Topic invites studies that clarify how climate change alters fungal ecology, contamination pathways, and exposure risks in food and feed systems. It should evaluate scalable approaches for detection, prediction, prevention, and governance while making climate relevance explicit and demonstrating practical implications for surveillance, risk assessment or mitigation. This will promote safer food and feed systems, enhance climate resilience, and support more sustainable agro-food systems at regional and global scales. Topic editors: Paola Giorni, Alicia Rodríguez, Juliane Welke, Nada El Darra, Bulent Kabak, Flávio Fonseca Veras Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79904/mycotoxins-and-fungal-threats-in-a-warming-world-climate-driven-risks-detection-prediction-and-mitigation-across-agro-food-systems