The toxic peptides of Amanita phalloides.

Abstract

Fatal mushroom poisoning is almost exclusively attributable to members of the genus Amanita. In the United States, it is Amanita verna, the so called “destroying angel”, which along with another poisonous species, A. tenuifolia, appears to play the major part in lethal mushroom poisoning (1, 2). Quite recently we were able to demonstrate the presence of the two main amanita toxins in a European sample of A. verna (73). Besides these mushrooms some relatively rare Galerina species also contain the amanita toxins (42). In Central Europe the predominant culprit is the greenish Amanita phalloides (Fig. 1). This mushroom, also known as the “deadly agaric”, is frequently confused with the delicious field mushroom Agaricus campestris or with the yellow Amanita mappa (citrina), which contains no toxic peptides, but the relatively untoxic bufotenine (5-hydroxy-N-dimethyl-tryptamine) (67, 43), a base occurring in toads and recently isolated also from different plants, among them Piptadenia peregrina (12), P. macrocarpa and P. excelsa (20), Desmodium pulchellum (19) or from Epena, a drug from a woody South American Leguminosa (28).KeywordsAspartic AcidUltraviolet SpectrumCysteic AcidPaper ElectrophoresisPaper ChromatogramThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.