Toxin-screening and identification of bacteria isolated from highly toxic marine gastropod Nassarius semiplicatus

Detection of hemolytic bacteria from Palythoa caribaeorum (Cnidaria, Zoantharia) using a novel palytoxin-screening assay

“…For example, while Vibrio harveyi and V. tubiashi (closely related to strains Pc243, Nn5, and Nn6) are pathogens of fish and invertebrates, V. gallicus (closely related to strains Zp10 and Zp34A) lives in a symbiotic relationship with the abalone Haliotis tuberculata (Sawabe et al 2004). Other representatives of the genus Vibrio are known to synthesize the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin (Yu et al 2004;Wang et al 2008). This toxin shares some ecological similarities with PTX in that it is also widely distributed in diverse marine organisms and is produced by several distinct clades of bacteria (Wang et al 2008).…”

“…Other representatives of the genus Vibrio are known to synthesize the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin (Yu et al 2004;Wang et al 2008). This toxin shares some ecological similarities with PTX in that it is also widely distributed in diverse marine organisms and is produced by several distinct clades of bacteria (Wang et al 2008).…”

“…Following screening of 420 isolates obtained from toxic samples of Palythoa colonies, the gram-negative Aeromonas and Vibrio species were identified to produce compounds antigenically related to PTX. Microbial production of another related, highly potent marine neurotoxin, tetrodotoxin (TTX), is well established (Simidu et al 1990;Wang et al 2008). Here, TTX producing strains were isolated from a highly toxic marine gastropod Nassarius semiplicatus and were found, by ways of 16S rRNA gene sequencing, to be related to the genus Vibrio and other Gammaproteobacteria.…”

Production level of tetrodotoxin in Aeromonas is associated with the copy number of a plasmid

“…Tetrodotoxin (TTX), a highly toxic non-protein neurotoxin of low molecular weight, has been identified in taxonomically diverse organisms across 14 different phyla (Chau et al, 2011), including pufferfish from the family Tetraodontidae, some species of goby, newt, frog, starfish, crab, octopus, gastropod and flatworm (Wakely et al, 1966;Noguchi and Hashimoto, 1973;Noguchi et al, 1983;Sheumack et al, 1984;Miyazawa et al, 1985;Mebs and Schmidt, 1989;Hwang et al, 1990;Ritson-Williams et al, 2005;Noguchi et al, 2006;Rodriguez et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2008;McNabb et al, 2010;Itoi et al, 2012;Stokes et al, 2014). The wide distribution of TTX among genetically distant animals makes the origin of TTX controversial.…”

“…Thereafter, more and more TTX-producing bacterial strains were isolated from numerous organisms and deep-sea sediments. These bacteria included Acinetobacter sp., Aeromonas sp., Alteromonas sp., Bacillus sp., Bacillus horikoshii, Cellulomonas fimi, Kytococcus sedentarius, Lysinibacillus fusiformis, Marinomonas sp., Microbacterium arabinogalactanolyticum, Nocardiopsis dassonvillei, Plesiomonas sp., Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis tetraodonis, Pseudomonas sp., Raoultella terrigena, Roseobacter sp., Serratia marcescens, Shewanella sp., Tenacibaculum sp., Vibrio alginolyticus and V. fischeri Narita et al, 1987;Sugita et al, 1987;Hwang et al, 1989;Do et al, 1990;Cheng et al, 1995;Ritchie et al, 2000;Lee et al, 2000;Wu et al, 2005;Wang et al, 2008Lu and Yi, 2009;Bragadeeswaran et al, 2010;Yang et al, 2010;Yu et al, 2004Yu et al, , 2011Pratheepa and Vasconcelos, 2013;Magarlamov et al, 2014). Even now there remains much debate in the literature about whether bacteria are truly the source of TTX in animals (Chau et al, 2011), although the bacterial origin of TTX in TTX-bearing pufferfish has been accepted (Noguchi et al, 2006).…”