Plant Toxins Affecting Animal Health and Production

Plant toxins are toxic secondary plant metabolites that occur naturally in a wide variety of common pasture and garden plants. These natural toxins are typically not harmful to the plants themselves but can adversely impact human or animal health through exposure in the environment and also when consumed in food and feed commodities. Plant toxins can adversely affect grazing livestock through specific toxicoses, such as pyrrolizidine alkaloid-associated liver disease and reproductive losses through abortion and teratogenic effects as seen in the consumption of jervoline alkaloids. Responses of livestock to acute poisoning by toxic plants are generally readily apparent when stock die. More insidious and harder to identify and/or quantify is the sub-acute chronic poisoning of stock that can result in productivity losses through poor weight gain and reproductive inefficiencies. Plant toxins consumed by livestock also have the potential to cause secondary poisoning whereby toxins accumulated in animal tissue have the potential to adversely affect secondary consumers.

This Special Issue provides a platform to survey the occurrence of plant toxins globally as well as investigations of their impact on livestock health and production. Understanding toxins and their prevalence and residue potential are all necessary aspects of this important global issue, and the development of appropriate analytical chemistry techniques to monitor these plant toxins are a central pillar to improving our understanding in this area.

Prof. Dr. Mary Fletcher
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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