Toxin Production in Cyanobacteria

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Project objective

In many lakes and rivers toxic cyanobacteria are found. This causes severe problems for recreation and drinking water production. The toxicity of cyanobacteria is found to be highly vanable. Toxic blooms can change ftom toxic to non-toxic and vise versa. It is not clear how far this is caused by a succession of toxic and non-toxic strains within one species or, by the changes in toxicity of one population. Morphological analyses and physiological knowledge cannot give a solution here. Little is known of the relation of this toxin with the food-web in fresh waters. Is this toxin produced to prevent grazing, what is the distribution of this toxin in the food-web. In the synthesis of Microcystin the toxin produced by the cyanobacterium Microcystis the enzyme microcystin-synthetase plays a crucial role. Recently two institutes of this network have sequenced the genes if this enzyme. With this information it becomes possible to produce probes and construct-strains which are extremely important tools for physiological and ecological research concerning toxin production in continuous cultures and in natural systems. In this mul- tidisciplinary research programme molecular biological tools will be developed and used to unravel the condi- tions under which this toxin is produced and what its influence is on thefood-web of the natural systems. A network-programme has been developed to train young post-docs to incorporate molecular biological, physiological and ecological theories and techniques to study one problem: toxin production in cyanobacteria. - The programme contains training on the job, short training couses, working visits, and an 8 week workshop. Important topics are: - The production of DNA-probes and reporter strains to be used in physiology and ecology to recognize toxin production in laboratory and field populations. - Toxin production will carefully compared with ecological relevant conditions in laboratory and field systems. - In an eight-week field traing-course the whole team of the network is training to use all information and molecular tools to study the toxicity of a field population of Microcystis and to compare this with the results of the physiological and enclosure studies. .

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM · AMSTERDAMCoordinatorNetherlands
• HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET BERLIN · BERLINGermany
• NORWEGIAN INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC HEALTH · OSLOCity levelNorway
• UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN · KOEPENHAGENDenmark
• UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE · DUNDEEUnited Kingdom
• UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI · HELSINKIFinland
• Umweltbundesamt · BerlinGermany

Links

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