Abstract
Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP) is currently the most common marine biotoxin food poisoning worldwide, associated with human consumption of circumtropical fish and marine invertebrates that are contaminated with ciguatoxins. Ciguatoxins are very potent sodium-channel activator neurotoxins, that pose risks to human health at very low concentrations (>0.01 ng per g of fish flesh in the case of the most potent Pacific ciguatoxin). Symptoms of CFP are nonspecific and intoxication in humans is often misdiagnosed. Presently, there is no medically approved treatment of ciguatera. Therefore, to mitigate the risks of CFP, reliable detection of ciguatoxins prior to consumption of fish tissue is acutely needed, which requires application of highly sensitive and quantitative analytical tests. During the last century a number of methods have been developed to identify and quantify the concentration of ciguatoxins, including in vivo animal assays, cell-based assays, receptor binding assays, antibody-based immunoassays, electrochemical methods, and analytical techniques based on coupling of liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry. Development of these methods, their various advantages and limitations, as well as future challenges are discussed in this review.
Highlights
Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP), currently the most common marine biotoxin food poisoning worldwide, is a non-bacterial foodborne disease associated with consumption of circumtropical fish and marine invertebrates that are contaminated with polyether sodium channel activator neurotoxins [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
The fish tissue extraction process due to several purification steps is slow compared to the time frame of modern analytical techniques, it is the rate-determining step for testing a fish sample
Island communities that are strongly dependent on fish for food resources have developed various means over centuries to decrease the risk of CFP [10,11,55,56]; these include rubbing a small piece of liver on the mouth or skin and testing for itchiness, cooking fish with a silver coin or copper wire and assessing discoloration, observing the color of fish gallbladder, examining food
Summary
Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP), currently the most common marine biotoxin food poisoning worldwide, is a non-bacterial foodborne disease associated with consumption of circumtropical fish and marine invertebrates that are contaminated with polyether sodium channel activator neurotoxins (ciguatoxins, CTXs) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Ciguatoxins are produced by certain benthic dinoflagellate species from the Gambierdiscus and Fukuyoa genera and enter the marine food chain via herbivorous fish and invertebrates [2,5,9,13] These toxins are subsequently biotransformed in herbivorous, omnivorous, and carnivorous fishes to more oxidized and more potent forms of CTXs and accumulate to toxic levels in edible fish. The concentration of toxins in fish liver is about 10–50 times higher than in muscle tissue [22,23], thereby CFP becomes more problematic in communities consuming fish viscera In extreme cases, such as for the liver of a large moray eel caught in Kiribati, toxicity can be as high as 539 ng g−1 , 50,000 times higher than the accepted safety level of 0.01 ng g−1 [23]. The contributions of these latter toxins to CFP is insignificant compared to that of CTXs, due to their high water solubility and low oral potency [8,9]; these toxins are beyond the scope of this review
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