Dear Colleagues,

Proliferations of cyanobacteria in freshwater ecosystems are a source of growing concern worldwide because of the ecological and economical disturbances they create, as well as the significant impact of their toxins on animal and human health. Cyanotoxins (e.g., microcystins, anatoxins, saxitoxins, cylindrospermopsins) are regulated with sanitary guideline values for drinking and recreational waters worldwide, and sometimes for organism consumption. Robust methods are then needed to evaluate their occurrence in aquatic environment and biota. Some methodological issues to assess cyanotoxin concentrations in biological matrices remain, notably for toxins accumulated under fractions covalently bound to polypeptides or to proteins which can represent a high proportion of accumulated cyantoxins in the case of microcystins. Some approaches already exist but still have to be developed, tested, and improved. Moreover, cyanobacterial proliferations display rapid spatiotemporal variations that can interfere in the assessment of water contamination levels by cyanotoxins and necessitate the use of integrative tools. Therefore, new strategies using passive or active integrators of cyanotoxins in situ are needed. This Special Issue plans to give an overview of the most recent advances in the field of survey and biosurvey of cyanotoxins. It will also provide selected contributions on methodological advances in the quantification of cyanotoxins, of their potent toxic metabolite products, and of their covalently bound fractions in animal tissues.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

1. Future perspectives for multi-cyanotoxin analyses;

2. New methods for analysis of free and bound cyanotoxins in cyanobacteria and biota;

3. Use of aquatic organisms as a bioindicator for monitoring cyanotoxins;

4. Development of passive integrators for multi-cyanotoxin detection;

5. Identification of metabolite products of cyanotoxins in animal tissues;

6. Toxicity of metabolite products of cyanotoxins.

Dr. Emilie Lance
Guest Editor

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