saxitoxin

Two years later, in the summer of 2017, saxitoxin emerged as a suspect in the strange behavior of a walrus that pulled out on the northern Bering Sea island of Little Diomede.

The poison in the shellfish is … called saxitoxin.

More recently, the identification of the cyanobacterial genes encoding the biosynthetic machinery that produces saxitoxin, a highly potent PST, have enabled a molecular understanding of PST assembly9.

One such compound is saxitoxin, a neurotoxin that tends to affect humans when they consume contaminated shellfish.

The advance could help to make the compound, saxitoxin, medically useful.