Mechanism of Palytoxin Toxicity

Palytoxin is one of the most potent toxins known, causing death in humans by cardiac arrest at doses as low as 2 ug.  Only botulinum and tetanus toxins are more potent.  Its multiple modes of action remain unclarified after more than 30 years of international investigation...

We found palytoxin profoundly inhibited (pM) sperm motility.   This provided a model system to study palytoxin's effects on contractility.   See Research Publications for our first three reports (#15, #27, and #41).   We also found that palytoxin had no direct effect on the contractile apparatus itself, but at extremely low doses lowered ATP and cAMP levels in intact cells in a manner that could be reversed by caffeine to restore motility (Morton, et. al., unpublished).