Keeping one step ahead of deadly marine toxins

Shauna: My name is Shauna Murray and I am Associate Professor and Researcher here at C3, the plant functional biology and climate change cluster at UTS:Science.

I research marine bio toxins, which are naturally produced toxins in the marine food web.

The marine microalgae are such an important part of our ecosystem that it feels that it is very ill understood and appreciated in what they do in terms of their photosynthetic contribution to our climate.

There are many factors that are increasing the abundance of harmful algal blooms worldwide, and in Australia in particular. One of these is rising ocean temperatures.

The East Australian Current Region, which is the major current that flows down from the Great Barrier Reef along the New South Wales coast into Tasmania, has increased in temperature roughly point 9 degrees over the last century.

It can also increase the window available for the optimum growth of these types of organisms. So we get an increase in the frequency and severity of blooms.

The team that I have here at UTS is wonderful. l I have 3 PhD students and 2 postdoctoral fellows and UTS has been very supportive of the development of our research as a group.

The lab facilities at UTS are world class, we have some brand new laboratories. They have all of the sophisticated equipment that you need for this type of research.

Most of the toxins I work with are neuro-toxins, which means they affect your nerve functioning. So one of the areas I research is ciguatera fish poisoning which is a type of poisoning caused by a marine microalgae and in Australia we have seen the most southward cases of ciguatera fish poisoning occurring this year and last year.

We had some funding from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as part of Australia’s aid to its neighbouring pacific nations. So we went to the Cook Islands and we worked together with the locals to try and help them understand the prevalence of ciguatera fish poisoning in Rarotonga, which is the main island of the Cook Islands, and we looked at the fish species they were catching along the reef and also at the marine microalgae that produced the toxin and carried the toxin; their prevalence and abundance.

The industry partners have been really important to the research, the NSW Food Authority in particular because this is something of great concern to them. They regulate for these types of toxins and their responsibility is to have safe seafood. And I also work with a molecular diagnostics company, Diagnostic Technology and their role in the project has been to commercialise the outcomes of the research into a useable tool that we can sell to farms.

Mark: I’m Mark VanAsten I’m Managing Director of Diagnostic Technology.

The work that Shauna is doing at UTS:C3 is critical to a process development that we are undertaking in expertise and bio toxin production. This extension now into the marine environment has a critical commercial application.

Shauna: A commercial aspect of this research is a shellfish test kit that we have been developing for seven years now, which was based on research into the genetics of toxicity in one particular micro algal species.

Mark: The technology that we have commercialised or commercialisng the discovery process of biotoxin production has been commericialised into a assay that is quite familiar for general laboratory use but our next challenge is to introduce it into an infield testing environment where testing can be performed by shellfish farmers or co-ops within an hour or two and give them online management capabilities.

One of the very positive outcomes that are both for a level of self-satisfaction and for the company is that it allows for food producers, in this particular case shell fish farmers, to ensure that their food or products are not contaminated with toxins which have some very severe and significant health implications to the public.