Vikuk Veronika, Fuchs Benjamin, Krischke Markus, Mueller Martin J, Rueb Selina, Krauss Jochen
Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, University of Würzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany.
Biodiversity Unit, University of Turku, 20014 Turku, Finland.
J Fungi (Basel). 2020 Sep 18;6(3):177. doi: 10.3390/jof6030177.
Mycotoxins in agriculturally used plants can cause intoxication in animals and can lead to severe financial losses for farmers. The endophytic fungus var. living symbiotically within the cool season grass species can produce vertebrate and invertebrate toxic alkaloids. Hence, an exact quantitation of alkaloid concentrations is essential to determine intoxication risk for animals. Many studies use different methods to detect alkaloid concentrations, which complicates the comparability. In this study, we showed that alkaloid concentrations of individual plants exceeded toxicity thresholds on real world grasslands in Germany, but not on the population level. Alkaloid concentrations on five German grasslands with high alkaloid levels peaked in summer but were also below toxicity thresholds on population level. Furthermore, we showed that alkaloid concentrations follow the same seasonal trend, regardless of whether plant fresh or dry weight was used, in the field and in a common garden study. However, alkaloid concentrations were around three times higher when detected with dry weight. Finally, we showed that alkaloid concentrations can additionally be biased to different alkaloid detection methods. We highlight that toxicity risks should be analyzed using plant dry weight, but concentration trends of fresh weight are reliable.
农业用植物中的霉菌毒素可导致动物中毒，并可能给农民造成严重的经济损失。内生真菌变种与冷季草种共生，可产生对脊椎动物和无脊椎动物有毒的生物碱。因此，准确测定生物碱浓度对于确定动物的中毒风险至关重要。许多研究使用不同的方法来检测生物碱浓度，这使得可比性变得复杂。在本研究中，我们表明，在德国的现实世界草原上，单株植物的生物碱浓度超过了毒性阈值，但在种群水平上并未超过。德国五个生物碱含量高的草原上的生物碱浓度在夏季达到峰值，但在种群水平上也低于毒性阈值。此外，我们表明，无论在田间还是在普通花园研究中，无论使用植物鲜重还是干重，生物碱浓度都呈现相同的季节性趋势。然而，用干重检测时，生物碱浓度大约高出三倍。最后，我们表明，生物碱浓度还可能因不同的生物碱检测方法而产生偏差。我们强调，应使用植物干重来分析毒性风险，但鲜重的浓度趋势是可靠的。
