Tetrodoxtoxin Immunoassays. Phase 2

Tetrodotoxin TTX is an extremely potent low molecular weight neurotoxin found in a few widely divergent marine and amphibian animal species including puffer fish, gobies, salamanders, frogs, octopus, shellfish and starfish. Following ingestion or invenomnation, humans may rapidly exhibit neurological symptoms leading to respiratory paralysis. Deaths occur in about 40 of the reported cases. Current methods of detecting and quantitating TTX suffer from low sensitivity, the presence of interfering compounds or so not lend themselves to large scale screening. This project was undertaken in response to the U.S. Armys need for a rapid, simple, and specific means to identify and quantitate TTX in a variety of biological matrices. Such an assay may also have commercial value in Japan where approximately 100 human fatalities occur annually due to the consumption of puffer fish containing high levels of TTX. During the two years of this project, our overall goal was to develop a sensitive immunoassay for the detection of trace quantities of tetrodotoxin in complex biological matrices.