Recent developments in the detection of phycotoxins

Over the past seven years, methods available for the detection of phycotoxins have been extensively reviewed in a number of international expert committees, such as the consultations organised by FAO/IOC/WHO and EFSA, as well as by individual scientists. These reviews have shown that the methods available have severe limitations for the use in official control, either due to their limited scope and detection capability or due to a lack of calibration standards, reference materials and validation efforts. The present review focuses on recent developments in the detection of phycotoxins in several areas of applied research. Not being able to exhaustively describe all recent developments, the review focussed on three areas of interest to the authors: (i) detection of ultra-trace amounts of toxins, (ii) metabolism of toxins and their localisation in biological tissues, and (iii) approaches to detect unknown toxins or analogues of known toxins. Miniaturisation in combination with physico-chemical techniques appears to be a very efficient approach to detect low trace amounts of individual toxin analogues. In particular, the detection of azaspiracids and okadaic acid and analogues, using micro-filtration and on-line pre-concentration techniques, has shown to be useful for the characterisation of various algal and shellfish species. In the area of interactions of toxins with shellfish and mammalian systems, it is noted that several studies on biomarkers reveal either protein biomarkers of exposure to toxins or potential pathways of metabolism of the toxins themselves. A particular focus is given to recent findings in the areas of brevetoxin metabolism and biomarkers as well as azaspiracid localisation and metabolism. Finally, the detection of novel compounds is a particularly challenging area. The interest in this area has risen over the past years following cases of unexplained mouse toxicity such as the UK cockle toxicity and the French atypical toxicity in mussels and oysters from the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Some attention is given to immuno-, functional and cellular bio-assays for the identification of bioactive agents in shellfish.