For an early warning of the blooming of toxic cyanobacteria it is important to recognise toxic populations as early as possible and to know under what environmental conditions toxin production will be stimulated.
To detect toxic populations, analytical and molecular biological methods will be compared and improved. The stimulation of toxin production will be studied under well-defined laboratory conditions in continuous cultures. As considerable research has already been done on the toxin microcystin, this project will concentrate on other toxins including nodularin, saxitoxins and cylindrospermopsin. The partners of the project will focus on different cyanobacterial species and special attention will be paid to the highly toxic Cylindrospermopsis, a relatively new species for Europe found in Lake Balaton.

CYNANOTOX is structured around four projects:

1. The analysis of toxins. HPLC, immunological analysis by ELISA, MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry and protein phosphatase inhibition will be compared. With the relatively new MALDI-TOFT MS very small amounts of different toxins types of toxins can be identified. These methods have been proven to be very successful for microcystins. In this project these will be tested for all toxins. Further immunoassay (ELISA) analysis will be developed for neosaxitoxin and cylindrospermopsin. The results will be compared with other methods.

2. Detection of genes involved in toxin synthesis. A PCR protocol will be established for the detection of genes involved in the production of toxic peptides. The presence of the genes toxin production will be correlated with toxin production. By using PCR a detection method will be developed for genes involved in microcystin production and in other peptide toxins in many different cyanobacteria.

3. Toxin synthesis, the regulation of toxin production will be studied. The influence of nutrient limitations and light quantity in combination with temperature will be tested in continuous cultures, using steady-state situations, and the pulsed supply of nutrients and light. The regulation of toxin production will be determined using methods developed in the project.

4. Field observations will be tested in field situations with different population size of toxic and non-toxic cyanobacteria.