Talk:Pyrrolizidine alkaloid

Pyrrolizidine is the name of Chemical compound. Pyrrolizidine, or hexahydropyrrolizine is C7H11N.

Therefore, I think that it should assume the name of this article to be Pyrrolizidine Alkaloids. 218.216.217.101 11:06, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Moved. -- Ed (Edgar181) 01:38, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Pyrrolizidine alkaloids and toxicity of coltsfoot
Robertadcran included the following text to the article, which I am deleting due to inaccuracies:

''However the presence of Pyrrolizidine alkaloids in specific herbs needs to be balanced against the complex organic whole. For example Tussilago farfara, known to contain Pyrrolizidine alkaloids, is not noted for toxicity in the literature This suggests that organic complexity whithn the whole plant or plant part and dosage ranges specified in traditional medicines play a part in avoiding toxicity which is so far beyond the single chemical focus of modern pharmacology.''

However, this is clearly not the case. There is two recognized cases of poisoning from coltsfoot documented in literature, and this is underscored by toxicological studies as well:

Tussilago farfara contains tumorigenic pyrrolizidine alkaloids. Senecionine and senkirkine, present in colstfoot, have the highest mutagenetic activity of any pyrrolozidine alkaloid tested using Drosophila melanogaster to produce a comparative genotoxicity test. There are documented cases of coltsfoot tea causing severe liver problems in an infant, and in another case, an infant developed liver disease and died because the mother drank tea containing coltsfoot during her pregnancy.

While I'm not sure what is written in the Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica on coltsfoot, I am removing the tract of text in the article by Robertadcran because it is clearly in contradiction to a substantial range of other reliable references.

Aareo (talk) 05:42, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

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I added a couple sentences and a citation providing an example of a species that uses PA as a defense mechanism. The section I added can be found in the lead of the article. kzyoung (talk) 01:53, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

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There's a mention of toxicity in relation to Australia, Patterson's Curse / Salvation Jane is sometimes the only living plant left during droughts or after bushfires here. Sometimes it's all the cattle have to eat (but it's poison, hence the two names, both curse and salvation to farmers). Sick cattle, dead horses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echium_plantagineum 60.240.172.112 (talk) 14:58, 10 February 2016 (UTC) Wikipedia n00b

possible References