J. Rapala et al., BIODEGRADABILITY AND ADSORPTION ON LAKE-SEDIMENTS OF CYANOBACTERIAL HEPATOTOXINS AND ANATOXIN-A, Letters in applied microbiology, 19(6), 1994, pp. 423-428
Cyanobacterial hepatotoxins and anatoxin-a, a neurotoxin, were shown t
o be degraded when crude extracts of lysed toxic laboratory strains of
cyanobacteria were exposed to natural populations of micro-organisms
from lakes. While anatoxin-a decayed equally fast with all the inocula
from lake sediment and water, the degradation rate of hepatotoxins wa
s higher with inocula from places at which cyanobacterial water blooms
had occurred than with inocula from places with no known mass occurre
nces of cyanobacteria. Degradation was slowest when an inoculum from a
humic lake was used. A part of the loss of the toxins was shown to be
due to adsorption on lake sediments.