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Molds themselves are not toxic. However, many molds do, under various circumstances, generate mycotoxins. "Mycotoxin is a big catch-all word," says Bruce B. Jarvis, professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland. "All mycotoxins are fungal metabolites that pose a health risk for humans and animals." Fungi use the toxins as a defense mechanism against other species while competing for space and food. Whether a fungus produces a mycotoxin depends on environmental triggers, including drying or loss of nutrients. THE BEST KNOWN mycotoxins may be the carcinogenic aflatoxins, which are infamous in agriculture for causing liver failure and even death when humans and animals eat moldy corn or peanuts. No indoor mold has been clearly documented to induce such a drastic response from airborne exposure. Yet molds common to the indoor environment are capable of making hundreds of biologically potent compounds, some of which may play a larger or smaller role in causing human health effects than we now realize. "I guess I inadvertently started the whole thing," says Bruce Jarvis, professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland. Jarvis first published work on Stachybotrys chartarum when he studied samples gathered in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. He and his coworkers knew that Stachybotrys produced many compounds, but what they could most easily detect was a group of compounds called trichothecenes. Then, Jarvis continues, "in 1985 or so, I was contacted by a fellow in Chicago who had been called in to investigate a home where people had been having medical problems. He found that they had a very heavy contamination of Stachybotrys. ... I told him that Stachybotrys tended to produce relatively small amounts of trichothecenes, and it produced lots of other things besides. But I told him I would be happy to do an analysis. So he sent me contaminated building materials, and I was somewhat taken aback. The materials had quite a bit of the macrocyclic trichothecenes. The people's symptoms were entirely consistent with exposure to these toxins," Jarvis says, "and we published a paper describing this case." Jarvis' purported troublemakers--macrocyclic trichothecenes--are highly cytotoxic. The terpenoid compounds are potent inhibitors of protein synthesis, and they work by binding to the eukaryotic ribosome to shut down protein translation |
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