Pankavec et al. 2019 — Mineral constituents of commercially pickled white button mushrooms (Poland)

This study characterised the multi-element composition of commercially conserved (pickled and canned) white button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) available on the Polish market in 2016, measuring 23 elements — Hg, Li, Mg, Al, Co, Ni, Cu, As, Se, Rb, Sr, Ag, Cd, Cs, Sb, Tl, Pb, U, Ba, Cr, Zn, Mn, V — across 100 unit packages drawn from 10 product batches and six manufacturers. The toxicologically critical analytes Pb, Cd, tHg, and tAs were present at overall medians of 0.072, 0.040, 0.043, and 0.030 mg/kg dry mass (dm) respectively, all well below the EU maximum levels of 0.30 mg/kg fresh weight (fw) for Pb and 0.20 mg/kg fw for Cd in cultivated Agaricus bisporus under Commission Regulation (EC) No 629/2008 (which, assuming the paper’s ~90% moisture conversion, correspond to roughly 3.0 and 2.0 mg/kg dm). Significant inter-producer variability was observed for Li, As, Rb, Sr, Ag, Ba, and Cs (PC1 of the PCA, 42% of total variance), which the authors attribute to differences in marinade quality (water, salt, vinegar) rather than mushroom substrate. Industrial conserving substantially reduces toxic-element content relative to fresh A. bisporus, particularly for tAs (roughly 10-fold reduction attributed to water-soluble arsenical species leaching during blanching and pickling) and Cd/Pb (roughly an order of magnitude lower medians than fresh).

Key numbers

All values reported as mg/kg dry mass (dm). The paper assumes approximately 90% moisture content in fresh mushrooms when comparing to fresh-weight regulatory limits; the conversions below use that assumption.

Overall median values across all 10 batches (Table 2, with paper text confirming As, Hg, Cd, Ag, Pb, Co, Mn, Cu medians):

Sb and Tl were measured but the paper does not report overall medians. Sb was detectable in roughly half the batches at per-batch medians of about 0.001–0.009 mg/kg dm; Tl was at or near detection (≈0.001–0.002 mg/kg dm) with “WD” (without data) in several batches. See Table 2 for per-batch detail.

One sliced-pickled batch in glass jars (PC1, 42% of total variance; corresponds to paper’s Batch ID 1) showed statistically elevated Li, As, Rb, Sr, Ag, Cs, and Ba — the authors interpret these as a marinade-quality contribution (water, vinegar, salt mineral content), not substrate contamination. One whole-pickled-in-natural-marinade batch in glass jars (PC2, 19%; Batch ID 9) showed elevated Se, Cr, Zn. Another whole-pickled batch in glass jars (PC3, 18%; Batch ID 2) showed elevated Al, U, V. One canned whole-pickled batch (PC4, 8.9%; Batch ID 4) showed elevated Mn. Two batches (PC5, 5.6%; Batch IDs 5 and 7) had relatively elevated Cd and Hg. Manufacturer identifiers from the paper’s Materials and Methods are omitted per Part 12; the paper’s Polish product-form descriptors (sliced vs whole; in marinade vs in natural marinade) carry the analytically informative content.

Comparison with fresh A. bisporus (from the paper’s literature comparison): fresh Polish A. bisporus showed Cd 0.36 ± 0.47 mg/kg dm (range 0.08–1.2), Pb 0.54 ± 0.54 mg/kg dm (range 0.15–27), Ag 0.19 ± 0.05 mg/kg dm — roughly an order of magnitude higher than the conserved medians in this study. Fresh A. bisporus (Poland) tAs was 0.63 ± 0.37 mg/kg dm versus < 0.05 mg/kg dm in sliced and whole pickled product in this study (roughly a 10-fold reduction). Fresh Hg in Polish A. bisporus has been reported at 0.069, 0.080, 0.11 mg/kg dm (n = 3); this study’s conserved-mushroom median (0.043 mg/kg dm) is roughly half that level.

Aluminum showed the widest inter-batch variability (overall median 2.8 mg/kg dm, batch medians 1.4–24 mg/kg dm). The authors attribute the high-Al batch to marinade quality, noting that Al is not efficiently leached from mushrooms during industrial marinating.

EU regulatory reference: Commission Regulation (EC) No 629/2008 amending 1881/2006 sets cultivated Agaricus bisporus maximum levels at 0.20 mg/kg fw for Cd and 0.30 mg/kg fw for Pb (paper §“As, Hg, Cd, Ag, Pb and Se”, referencing the 2.0 and 3.0 mg/kg dm equivalents assuming 90% moisture). All 10 batches in this study were well below these limits on both bases.

Methods

ICP-MS DRC (PerkinElmer SCIEX ELAN 6100 DRC II, dynamic reaction chamber with NH3 and O2 reaction gases) for 22 elements; CV-AAS thermal-decomposition direct mercury analyser (MA-2000, Nippon Instruments Corporation, Takatsuki, Japan) for Hg. Sample preparation: drained mushrooms were rinsed in 10% HNO3-soaked / DI-water-rinsed glassware, frozen at −30 °C, lyophilised (Steris LYOVAC GT2), and ground to fine powder in porcelain mortars. Subsamples of 300–400 mg were digested in 5 ml concentrated HNO3 (65%, Suprapur, Merck) in closed PTFE vessels under microwave (CEM MARSXpress: 1.2 kW, ramp 1–10 min to 100 °C, hold 1–10 min, ramp 2–10 min to −800 psi, hold 2–10 min at 100 °C, 5 min cooling); digests diluted to 10 ml with double-deionised water. Internal standards: 45Sc, 74Ge, 103Rh, 159Tb. QA/QC verified using Polish certified reference materials CS-M-2 (dried Agaricus campestris powder) and CS-M-3 (dried Boletus edulis powder), Institute of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology, Warsaw.

Sampling design: 10 product batches representing 6 manufacturers (brand identifiers omitted per Part 12; the paper’s Materials and Methods names each producer). 80 unit packages were in glass jars and 20 were in cans (canned packages all from one of the six manufacturers); samples were drawn randomly from retail shops in the city of Gdańsk in 2016.

Statistical analysis: Statistica v8.0 (StatSoft). Principal Component Analysis with Varimax rotation on 18 elements × 10 batches; factor-loading thresholds 0.75 (strong), 0.75–0.5 (moderate), 0.5–0.3 (weak). Five statistically significant PCs accounted for 93% of variability.

Basis: dry mass throughout. The paper performs fresh-weight conversions where comparing to EU limits or external studies, using an assumed ≈ 90% moisture content for fresh A. bisporus.

Implications

Certification: Conserved/pickled mushrooms appear to be a low-risk product for the four primary regulated analytes (Pb, Cd, tHg, tAs) on the Polish market under this 2016 sampling. The pickling process itself functions as a partial decontamination step: water-soluble arsenical species and ionic Cd/Pb leach into the marinade during blanching and brining, yielding roughly 10-fold lower tAs and order-of-magnitude lower Cd/Pb medians relative to fresh A. bisporus. The dominant within-product variability source is marinade quality (water, vinegar, salt mineral composition), not mushroom substrate. Al is the highest-concentration non-essential element (per-batch medians up to 24 mg/kg dm) and is not efficiently removed by pickling.

Courses: Strong worked example for “processing changes the heavy-metal risk profile” — useful for teaching the distinction between substrate-driven contamination (mushroom growing medium) and processing-driven contamination (marinade ingredients). The PC1 vs PC2 vs PC3 vs PC4 vs PC5 decomposition illustrates how analytical chemistry plus PCA can attribute contamination to ingredient inputs vs raw material.

App: Pickled and canned white button mushrooms can be assigned low-risk contamination profiles for Pb, Cd, tHg, and tAs on the basis of this study, with the caveat that inter-batch variability of up to roughly 10× was observed for several elements (Li, As, Rb, Sr, Ag, Ba, Cs). Al is the highest-concentration trace contaminant and is driven by marinade quality. Lot-to-lot variation is real and relevant for any per-serving estimator.

Microbiome: Not addressed.

Verification notes

• 2026-05-28: Merge-enhanced from 2026-05-14 ingest. Corrected legacy raw_handle (manual-fetch-kimi → MFK_mineral-constituents-of-conserved-white-button-mus); restored truncated raw_path (was (Agaricu.pdf; now full filename); added raw_sha256 (dc384816afece3c55aa2830567b4e653bbadcb3f86dcd680d1905981b1a233b0) and access_url; broadened metals: from [Pb, Cd, tHg, tAs, Ni, Al, Cr, U, Sb] to the full set of 21 measured metals with HMI metal pages (added Ag, Tl, Co, Cu, Zn, Mn, Mg, Se, Li, Cs, Ba, V).
• 2026-05-28: Removed fabricated Sb overall-median value (prior page stated “Sb 0.015 (approx.)” but the paper does not report an overall Sb median in either the abstract, results text, or Conclusions; Table 2 shows Sb measured in only ~4 batches with per-batch medians of about 0.001–0.009 mg/kg dm and “WD” in others). Reworded as a per-batch range with explicit “WD” caveat. Same treatment applied to Tl. Added per-batch median ranges for the remaining elements that were previously absent from the Key numbers table (V, Mg, Mn, Cu, Zn, Li, Cs, Rb, Ba, Sr) directly from Table 2.
• 2026-05-28: Corrected unit error in opening paragraph — prior version said “EU limits of 0.30 mg/kg dm for Pb and 0.20 mg/kg dm for Cd”; the EU limits are 0.30 and 0.20 mg/kg fresh weight (fw), which the paper converts to ≈ 3.0 and ≈ 2.0 mg/kg dm under a 90%-moisture assumption.
• 2026-05-28: Added PC2/PC3/PC4 batch attributions that were absent in the prior version (Batch ID 2 → Al/U/V, Batch ID 4 → Mn, etc.) per Table 3 and the PCA discussion.
• 2026-05-28: Confirmed CC BY-NC 3.0 PL licence from the article’s published declaration on the final page.
• 2026-05-28: Apparent paper-internal contradiction on Cs overall median. The §“Li, Cs and Rb” paragraph (p. 18) states “the Li and Cs with medians respectively in the range 0.01 to 0.40 and 0.004 to 0.02 mg kg⁻¹ dm (the overall medians 0.045 and 0.15 mg kg⁻¹ dm).” For Li the per-batch median range (0.01–0.40) and the overall median (0.045) are consistent; for Cs an overall median of 0.15 sits roughly an order of magnitude above the stated per-batch median range of 0.004–0.02 and cannot be reconciled with Table 2. The Cs overall median is most likely “0.015” (consistent with the per-batch range) and the printed “0.15” is a missing-zero typo, but rather than silently correct the published number this page reports the value as the paper printed it and flags the inconsistency. Downstream users should treat the Cs overall median as approximately 0.005–0.015 mg/kg dm and not propagate the printed 0.15.
• 2026-05-28: Audit subagent (fresh-context) flagged Part 12 brand-firewall concern on PCA batch attributions (Notre Jardin, Ole, Bonduelle, Rolnik, Urbanek, Smak named with elevated-element attributions). Verified against the paper’s Materials and Methods (p. 16, lines naming each producer per batch) — finding confirmed. Stripped manufacturer names from sample_population frontmatter, the PCA batch-attribution paragraph, and the Methods sampling-design paragraph; replaced with paper-given Batch IDs and product-form descriptors (sliced vs whole; glass-jar vs canned; in marinade vs in natural marinade). Polish product-form descriptors (“Pieczarki marynowane krojone” etc.) also removed because they tie one-to-one to specific manufacturer product lines.
• 2026-05-28: Audit subagent flagged regulations/eu-ec-629-2008 as outside the current taxonomy snapshot. Verified against wiki/regulations/ directory — page does not exist; the parent eu-1881-2006-contaminants-superseded (which EC 629/2008 amends) is the correct routing target and is in the snapshot. Re-routed the regulation wikilink at the bottom of this page.

Wiki pages updated on ingest

• mushrooms — provisional scaffold (created during this ingest; freq-8 across corpus)
• canned-mushrooms — provisional scaffold (created during this ingest)
• pickled-mushrooms — provisional scaffold (created during this ingest)
• lead
• cadmium
• mercury-total
• arsenic-total
• silver
• antimony
• thallium
• uranium
• nickel
• aluminum
• chromium
• cobalt
• copper
• zinc
• manganese
• magnesium
• vanadium
• lithium
• cesium
• barium
• eu-1881-2006-contaminants-superseded (parent framework as amended by EC 629/2008; this was the regulation in force during the paper’s 2016 sampling and is now superseded by EU 2023/915)

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.