Monitoring the presence of domoic acid in the production areas of bivalve molluscs

Abstract

Algal biotoxins, chemical compounds produced by some microscopic algae, constitute the phytoplankton. The mussels, feeding on phytoplankton, can accumulate these compounds to become themselves toxic. There have been several cases of food poisoning by consumption of contaminated shellfish. Such food poisoning have pushed our health care system to provide monitoring of shellfish in the framework of the monitoring plans carried out by AASSLL. In this paper we report the results obtained monitoring the presence of amnesic shellfish poisoning biotoxins, like domoic acid and its isomers, produced by Pseudonitzschia algae. The analyses were carried out by using both the high-performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet official method and an experimental method performed with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ESI-TOF). The 100% of samples analysed by the official method have always been below the limits of sensitivity (except one sample), and the 65% of samples analysed by ESI-TOF showed the presence of domoic acid.

Toxic marine microalgae and noxious blooms in the Mediterranean Sea: A contribution to the Global HAB Status Report

“…S1), with abundances up to several million cells•L -1 (e.g., Caroppo et al, 2005;Cerino et al, 2005;Quiroga et al, 2006;Quijano-Scheggia et al, 2008;Ljubešić et al, 2011;Marić et al, 2011;Cabrini et al, 2012;Ruggiero et al, 2015;Taş and Lundholm, 2017;Totti et al, 2019a). Nevertheless, the detection of DA has caused the closure of aquaculture plants only in a limited number of cases (4% of toxicity events in HAEDAT) in southern Spain (HAEDAT) and France (Amzil et al, 2001), whereas DA values below the regulatory limit have occasionally been found in shellfish from the Adriatic Sea (Ciminiello et al, 2005;Ujević et al, 2010;Arapov et al, 2016), Greece (Kaniou-Grigoriadou et al, 2005), and in 65% of 180 mussel samples from mid-Tyrrhenian waters (Rossi et al, 2016). In a few cases, the presence of DA in bivalves was related to a specific taxon, i.e., P. calliantha along the Croatian coast (Marić et al, 2011) and in the Gulf of Trieste (Honsell et al, 2008) and P. brasiliana in the Bizerte Lagoon in Tunisia (Sahraoui et al, 2011).…”

Occurrence and Exposure Assessment of Lipophilic Shellfish Toxins in the Zhejiang Province, China

“…Marine toxins can be categorized as lipophilic or hydrophilic, based on their solubility [ 3 ]. Hydrophilic toxins are distributed globally [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ], especially saxitoxin (STX) and domoic acid toxin groups, which cause paralytic and amnesic shellfish poisoning, respectively [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. However, more than 90% of marine toxins are lipophilic [ 13 ], with examples including okadaic acid (OA) and its analogs dinophysistoxins (DTXs), pectenotoxins (PTXs), azaspiracids, yessotoxins (YTXs), spirolids, gymnodimines, and pinnatoxins, collectively known as lipophilic shellfish toxins (LSTs) [ 14 , 15 ].…”