ABSTRACT
The synthesis of toxins in poisonous mushrooms occurs using ribosomes or in biochemical pathways. In the ›rst case, cyclopeptide toxins such as amatoxins, phallotoxins, and most probably virotoxins (Hallen et al. 2007) are produced and post-translationary enzymatically modi›ed. In the second type of synthesis, different enzymes involved are responsible for toxins’ biosynthesis in biochemical pathways. The death cap and its white variants most commonly cause fatal poisonings of mushroom pickers. This is due to the presence of cyclopeptides such as amatoxins and phallotoxins. Amatoxins are about 10-20 times more toxic than phallotoxins. The structure of amatoxins includes amino acid sequences Ile-Trp-Gly-Ile-Gly-CysAsn-Pro (α-amanitin) or Ile-Trp-Gly-Ile-Gly-Cys-Asp-Pro (β-amanitin), cyclized by “head-to-tail” peptide bonds, and the connection between Trp and Cys residues. Further differentiation between amatoxins (α-, γ-, β-, ε-amanitin, amanin, amanullin, amanullinic acid, proamanullin, and amanin amide-occur only in Amanita virosa) is the different distributions of the speci›c substituents: -H, -OH, and -NH2. Peptides are post-translationary cyclized (Luo et al. 2014) to form biologically active toxins (Figure 3.1) present in mushrooms (Sgambelluri et al. 2014). The mode of action of α-amanitin relies on strong af›nity to the catalytic site of RNA polymerase II
3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 53 3.2 The Number of Cases of Mushroom Poisoning ............................................. 57 3.3 Morphology .................................................................................................... 57 3.4 Phylogenetic Analysis ..................................................................................... 58 3.5 Detection Methods for Hallucinogenic and Poisonous Mushrooms .............. 59
3.5.1 Isolation of Pure DNA Samples .......................................................... 59 3.5.2 Detection of the Genes Coding for Toxins by PCR ............................60
