Toxic Compounds from Poisonous Plants: Identification and Analytical Methods

Dear Colleagues,

Plant toxins are secondary metabolites produced by a range of plant species that can have deleterious impacts on both human and animal health, and potentially form residues in food and feed commodities. Such toxins can be considered plant defenses against predation, and occur as widely varying chemical structures from simple amino acids such as indospicine to diverse pyrrolizidine alkaloids and beyond. Plant toxins have been identified as contaminants in herbal medicines and in cases of unintentional plant substitutions. In rare instances, plant toxins such as indospicine can accumulate in the tissues of grazing livestock and cause the secondary poisoning (and even death) of other animals. Plant toxins such as pyrrolizidine alkaloids have also been reported in honey where bees imbibe nectar from plants producing such alkaloids. Unlike mycotoxins, plant toxins are rarely regulated in food/feed, but diagnosis of their impact and/or prevalence requires the establishment of high-throughput analytical chemistry methods, such as LC-MS and GC-MS, with increasingly lower limits of detection. Thus, this Special Issue focuses on the identification and analysis of plant toxins, including in both plant and animal tissues, as well as implications for human and animal health.

Dr. Natasha Hungerford
Prof. Mary Fletcher
Guest Editors

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