There is a chance that an antidote for cap mushrooms and other poison fungi can be found

When do people accidentally ingest death caps? Detecting the indocyanine green that can lead to bacterial antidotes

The indocyanine green has been approved by the European Medicines Agency and the FDA. The chemical is known to be safe at certain dosages, so Wang and Wan hope that they can soon begin testing it in people, although finding funding might be challenging, and tests will need to rely on people who accidentally ingest death caps. Félix Carvalho from the University of Porto in Portugal said that timing will be important in these studies. Even though the researchers treated the mice with indocyanine green, most people who eat death caps don’t show up to the hospital for 24 to 48 hours, even though their condition is serious. By that time, it may be too late.

The researchers are very excited about the medical advances that this method could bring. “There should be more scientific studies like this,” Patočka says.

In the Czech Republic there is a toxicologist named Ji Patoka who says he’s excited about this method for finding antidotes. Bode thinks similar experiments could identify antidotes for bacterial toxins that cause sepsis, which is currently difficult to treat.

The Secret Life of the Amanitin Phenomenon: How a STT3B pathway might help fight the poisonous amanitas

Cells with a functional version of an Enzyme called Strt3B are able to survive in spite of being lacking in other parts of the body. STT3B is part of a biochemical pathway that adds sugar molecules to proteins. Interrupting this pathway would cause the toxins to not enter cells and cause havoc. We are totally surprised that nobody knew that STT3B played a part in -amanitin toxicity. The researchers will be investigating how the STT3B pathway lets -Amanitin inside cells.

The cells were edited to break individual genes. They fed the poison to see which ones were still alive. The researchers theorize that a broken STT3B gene might help transport the toxin into human cells.

“That’s fantastic,” says Helge Bode, a natural product chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. Aritin is one of the most dangerous compounds that we have.

Amanita phalloides is the most famous of the death cap mushrooms. The group known as lethal amanitas destroy angels and other species, which are responsible for 90 percent of deaths by mushroom poisoning around the world.

While foragers should take heed of regular warnings by health officials about the dangers of poisonous mushrooms, most mushrooms are not dangerous. In reality, “the vast majority are completely innocuous,” says Marin Brewer, a mycologist at the University of Georgia. “There’s a really small percent that are tasty gourmet edibles, and then a really small percent that are poisonous.”

“There just isn’t this broader knowledge that each region has its own endemic fungal biodiversity. Death caps can be found in some places. They are native to some places Intruding in others. [North America], and totally absent from other places.” Pringle says something.

The drug has only been shown to work in mice, but if it is proven to be effective in humans, it could help prevent death from poisoning by death caps, and many other mushroom species.

The only way to test the effectiveness of ICG is to have a patient come into a hospital after eating a death cap. Doctors can give a patient a drug to see if it works.

“If the word antidote is used to mean, like, you give it and everyone recovers, it’s probably not quite there yet, because you haven’t tested it in humans,” says Pringle. “Human trials are tricky when it comes to this kind of work because you can’t feed people mushrooms and then try to cure them.”

When they gave mice ICG after they had been poisoned with AMA, the drug had a clear protective effect in the livers of the mice, and the rates of survival improved from about 20% to 50%.

So the team used a computer program to look for FDA approved drugs that might block STT3B from working. They found a match in the compound ICG, an iodide based dye that has been used in humans since 1956 to help diagnose diseases in the eye.

But in new research published this week in Nature Communications, a team of Chinese and Australian scientists reports that they may have found an antidote for death cap mushroom poisoning – and it’s a widely available drug that already has FDA approval.

Someone who accidentally eats a mushroom will not feel sick for hours. Initially, their symptoms tend to be horrible gastrointestinal problems, vomiting, and dehydration.

The amanitas make a toxin called -amanitin, which can be found in the organs of the body. It causes the cellular processes in those organs to grind to a halt.

Immigrants as a Victim of Death Cap Muons: A Mycologist’s Advice to Avoid Migrant Epidemics

Those most susceptible to mushroom poisoning are often immigrants, says Anne Pringle, a mycologist and expert on death cap mushrooms at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.