Inspectors from the United States have recently banned or turned away a growing number of Chinese exports, including monkfish with life-threatening levels of puffer fish toxins, drug-laced frozen eel and juice made with unsafe color additives.
With respect to the amino acid sequence similarity, the scorpaeniform fish toxins are divided into the following two groups: toxins from three species of lionfish and those from devil stinger, two species of stonefish and waspfish.
As a result, the crude venom extract was shown to have mouse-lethal activity, hemolytic activity against rabbit erythrocytes, edema-forming activity and nociceptive activity, similar to the known scorpaeniform fish toxins (stonefish toxins and their analogues).
The three scorpaeniform fish toxins contain a B30.2/SPRY domain (∼200 amino acid residues) in the C-terminal region of each subunit, as reported for the toxins from two species of lionfish and two species of stonefish.
Furthermore, the genes encoding both subunits were cloned from genomic DNA and shown to have an architecture of three exons and two introns, as reported for those of the scorpaeniform fish toxins.
In a wider context sequence signals arising from the presence of parasitic and or harmful species such as cyanobacteria, forming shell fish toxins, will be useful for disease assessment of Mytilus.
The γ-aminobutyric acid gated chloride channel is the molecular target of several very potent fish toxins, specifically, endosulfan, lindane, toxaphene, and fipronil (Ratra et al. 2001).
For centuries the Zoque indigenous people have conducted a fertility ceremony ("La Pesca") during the holy week before Easter, in which they use barbasco plant roots (Lonchocarpus sp., Fabaceae) that contain the fish-toxin rotenone to poison cave fish.
He said the study found somewhat lower levels of toxins in the white croaker of Santa Monica Bay (other species of Santa Monica Bay fish contained toxin levels equal to those of the Palos Verdes fish) and much lower levels of toxins in the five species of fish studied off Laguna Beach.
It also raises concerns about what happens further up in the food chain if fish absorb toxins.
