Precautions for seafood consumers: An updated review of toxicity, bioaccumulation, and rapid detection methods of marine biotoxins.

Seafood products are globally consumed, and there is an increasing demand for the quality and safety of these products among consumers. Some seafoods are easily contaminated by marine biotoxins in natural environments or cultured farming processes. When humans ingest different toxins accumulated in seafood, they may exhibit different poisoning symptoms. According to the investigations, marine toxins produced by harmful algal blooms and various other marine organisms mainly accumulate in the body organs such as liver and digestive tract of seafood animals. Several regions around the world have reported incidents of seafood poisoning by biotoxins, posing a threat to human health. Thus, most countries have legislated to specify the permissible levels of these biotoxins in seafood. Therefore, it is necessary for seafood producers and suppliers to conduct necessary testing of toxins in seafood before and after harvesting to prohibit excessive toxins containing seafood from entering the market, which therefore can reduce the occurrence of seafood poisoning incidents. In recent years, some technologies which can quickly, conveniently, and sensitively detect biological toxins in seafood, have been developed and validated, these technologies have the potential to help seafood producers, suppliers and regulatory authorities. This article reviews the seafood toxins sources and types, mechanism of action and bioaccumulation of marine toxins, as well as legislation and rapid detection technologies for biotoxins in seafood for official and fishermen supervision.

Structures and Anti-Allergic Activities of Natural Products from Marine Organisms.

In recent years, allergic diseases have occurred frequently, affecting more than 20% of the global population. The current first-line treatment of anti-allergic drugs mainly includes topical corticosteroids, as well as adjuvant treatment of antihistamine drugs, which have adverse side effects and drug resistance after long-term use. Therefore, it is essential to find alternative anti-allergic agents from natural products. High pressure, low temperature, and low/lack of light lead to highly functionalized and diverse functional natural products in the marine environment. This review summarizes the information on anti-allergic secondary metabolites with a variety of chemical structures such as polyphenols, alkaloids, terpenoids, steroids, and peptides, obtained mainly from fungi, bacteria, macroalgae, sponges, mollusks, and fish. Molecular docking simulation is applied by MOE to further reveal the potential mechanism for some representative marine anti-allergic natural products to target the H1 receptor. This review may not only provide insight into information about the structures and anti-allergic activities of natural products from marine organisms but also provides a valuable reference for marine natural products with immunomodulatory activities.

Treatment of allergy: Overview of synthetic anti-allergy small molecules in medicinal chemistry.

The prevalence of allergic diseases has been continuously increasing over the past few decades, affecting approximately 20-30% of the global population. Allergic reactions to infection of respiratory tract, digestive tract, and skin system involve multiple different targets. The main difficulty of anti-allergy research is how to develop drugs with good curative effect and less side effects by adopting new multi-targets and mechanisms according to the clinical characteristics of different allergic populations and different allergens. This review focuses on information concerning potential therapeutic targets as well as the synthetic anti-allergy small molecules with respect to their medicinal chemistry. The structure-activity relationship and the mechanism of compound-target interaction were highlighted with perspective to histamine-1/4 receptor antagonists, leukotriene biosynthesis, Th2 cytokines inhibitors, and calcium channel blockers. We hope that the study of chemical scaffold modification and optimization for different lead compounds summarized in this review not only lays the foundation for improvement of success rate and efficiency of virtual screening of antiallergic drugs, but also can provide valuable reference for the drug design of related promising research such as allergy, inflammation, and cancer.