Kinetics of accumulation and transformation of paralytic shellfish toxins in the blue mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis.

Mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) were fed cultures of the Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning agent Alexandrium minutum (Strain AL1V) for a 15-day period and, for the next 12 days, they were fed the non-toxic species Tetraselmis suecica, in order to monitor the intoxication/detoxification process. The toxin content in the bivalve was checked daily throughout the experiment. During the time-course of the experiment, the toxin profile of the bivalves changed substantially, showing increasingly greater differences from the proportions found in the toxigenic dinoflagellate used as food. The main processes involved in the accumulation of toxins and in the variation of the toxic profiles were implemented in a series of numerical models and the usefulness of those models to describe the actual intoxication/detoxification kinetics was assessed. Models that did not include transformations between toxins were unable to describe the kinetics, even when different detoxification rates were allowed for the toxins involved. The models including epimerization and reduction provided a good description of the kinetics whether or not differential detoxification was allowed for the different toxins, suggesting that the differences in detoxification rates between the toxins are not an important factor in regulating the change of the toxic profile. The implementation of Michaelis-Menten kinetics to describe the two reductive transformations produced a model that had a poorer fit to the data observed than the model that included only a first order kinetics. This suggests that, it is very unlikely that any enzymatic reaction is involved in the reduction of the hydroxycarbamate (OH-GTXs) to carbamate (H-GTXs) gonyautoxins.