Abstract
The prevalence of poisoning events due to harmful algal blooms (HABs) has declined during the last two decades through monitoring programs and legislation, implemented mainly for bivalves. However, new toxin vectors and emergent toxins pose a challenge to public health. Several locations on the Portuguese coast were surveyed between 2009 and 2010 for three distinct biotoxin groups [saxitoxin (PST), spirolide (SPX) and okadaic acid (OA)], in 14 benthic species of mollusks and echinoderms. Our main goals were to detect new vectors and unravel the seasonal and geographical patterns of these toxins. PSTs were analyzed by the Lawrence method, SPXs by LC-MS/MS, and OA by LC-MS/MS and UPLC-MS/MS. We report 16 new vectors for these toxins in the North Atlantic. There were differences in toxin contents among species, but no significant geographical or seasonal patterns were found. Our results suggest that legislation should be adjusted to extend the monitoring of marine toxins to a wider range of species besides edible bivalves.
Highlights
The occurrence of harmful algal blooms (HABs) has been increasing globally throughout the 20th century [1]
A sample was considered positive when the toxin levels detected were above the limit of detection (LOD); 30.2% of these samples were below the limit of quantification (LOQ) for SXT and its analogs (Figure 1)
We focused our sampling on edible species, and other species that play an important role in the food-chain: gastropods (Monodonta lineata, Monodonta turbinata, Gibbula umbilicalis, Gibbula magus, Littorina littorea, Littorina saxatilis, Nucella lapillus, Patella intermedia, Aplysia depilans, Charonia lampas), bivalves (Mytilus galloprovincialis), sea-urchins (Paracentrotus lividus, Echinus esculentus) and starfish (Marthasterias glacialis)
Summary
The occurrence of harmful algal blooms (HABs) has been increasing globally throughout the 20th century [1]. HABs have a severe impact on the economy and human health, because phycotoxins may travel along the food chain, contaminating edible shellfish, resulting in intoxication incidents [3,4,5,6,7]. These phycotoxins can be classified as being either hydrophilic or lipophilic, with typical molecular weights (MW) of 500 Da and 600 Da, respectively [8]. The establishment of legislation, mostly for edible bivalves and monitoring programs are of extreme importance for poisoning prevention [7,12,13]
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