Publication Date:
1980-06-20
Description:
Batrachotoxin is present in remarkably high amounts in the skin of Phyllobates terribilis. Levels of batrachotoxin tend to be reduced when P. terribilis is maintained in captivity, but even after being confined for up to 6 years, these frogs were still at least five times more toxic than other Phyllobates species used by natives for poisoning blowgun darts. Batrachotoxin was not detectable in F1 progeny reared to maturity in captivity. Nerve and muscle preparations from wild-caught frogs and from the nontoxic F1 frogs were both insensitive to batrachotoxin. The regulatory site controlling sodium-channel activation and permeability appears to have been minimally altered to prevent interaction with batrachotoxin, but is still sensitive to other sodium conductance activators (veratridine, grayanotoxin) to which the frogs arenot exposed naturally.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Daly, J W -- Myers, C W -- Warnick, J E -- Albuquerque, E X -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1980 Jun 20;208(4450):1383-5.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6246586" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Age Factors
;
Animals
;
Anura/*physiology
;
Batrachotoxins/metabolism/*pharmacology
;
Diterpenes/*pharmacology
;
Ion Channels/*drug effects
;
Membrane Potentials/drug effects
;
Motor Endplate/drug effects
;
Synaptic Transmission/drug effects
;
Veratridine/*pharmacology
;
Veratrine/*analogs & derivatives
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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