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ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Albany, California » Western Regional Research Center » Foodborne Toxin Detection and Prevention Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #371096
Research Project: Advance the Development of Technologies for Detecting and Determining the Stability and Bioavailability of Toxins that Impact Food Safety and Food Defense

Location: Foodborne Toxin Detection and Prevention Research

Title: Rapid, sensitive, and accurate point-of-care detection of lethal amatoxins in urine

Author
item Bever, Candace
item SWANSON, KENNETH - Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) - United States
item HAMELIN, ELIZABETH - Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) - United States
item FILIGENZI, MICHAEL - University Of California, Davis
item POPPENGA, ROBERT - University Of California, Davis
item KAAE, JENNIFER - Pet Emergency & Specialty Center Of Marin (PESCM)
item Cheng, Luisa
item STANKER, LARRY - Former ARS Employee

Submitted to: Toxins
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/12/2020
Publication Date: 2/15/2020
Citation: Bever, C.R., Swanson, K.D., Hamelin, E.I., Filigenzi, M., Poppenga, R., Kaae, J., Cheng, L.W., Stanker, L.H. 2020. Rapid, sensitive, and accurate point-of-care detection of lethal amatoxins in urine. Toxins. 12(2):123. https://doi.org/10.3390/toxins12020123.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/toxins12020123

Interpretive Summary: One of the deadliest natural toxins is amatoxins and it is found in a small variety of mushrooms. If an amatoxin-containing mushroom is eaten, the toxin can be detected in a patient’s urine. Methods to detect amatoxins from urine samples are labor-intensive and expensive. In this paper, we report the application of a rapid and portable detection method for amatoxins. We utilized our previously generated antibody-based point-of-care test strip that takes ~10 mins for the visual determination of presence or absence of amatoxins in a sample. We tested human urine samples spiked with amatoxins as well as urine from dogs that had eaten amatoxin-containing mushrooms. The detection of amatoxins in these urine samples correlated very well with the gold standard liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry detection methods. The speed of analysis and lack of requirement for trained personnel and expensive instrumentation, means that this test strip method would be a great improvement over the current gold standard detection methods. This simple test can aid in the diagnosis of amatoxin-specific mushroom poisonings.

Technical Abstract: Globally, mushroom poisonings cause about 100 human deaths each year, with thousands of people requiring medical assistance. Cyclopeptides, and more specifically a-amanitin (a-AMA, and the class of amatoxins), is the mushroom poison that causes the majority of these deaths. Current methods to detect amatoxins are time-consuming and require expensive equipment. In this work, we demonstrate the utility of our previously developed lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) for the rapid detection of amatoxins from urine samples. The LFIA detects as little as 10 ng/mL of a-AMA or '-AMA in urine samples from exposed individuals (humans and dogs). Urine is sampled directly without the need for any pretreatment, detection from urine is completed in 10 minutes, and the results are read by eye, without the need for specialized equipment. Analysis of both fortified human urine samples and urine samples from intoxicated dog, using the LFIA test correlated well with liquid-chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) methods.