Putative palytoxin and its new analogue, ovatoxin-a, in Ostreopsis ovata collected along the Ligurian coasts during the 2006 toxic outbreak

In this article we report on the liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS) investigation of plankton samples collected in the summer of 2006 along the Ligurian coasts, coinciding with a massive bloom of the tropical microalga Ostreopsis ovata. LC-MS analyses indicated the occurrence of putative palytoxin along with a much more abundant palytoxin-like compound never reported so far, which we named ovatoxin-a. On the basis of molecular formula, fragmentation pattern, and chromatographic behavior, the structure of ovatoxin-a appeared to be strictly related to that of palytoxin. We report also on the analysis of cultured O. ovata, which was necessary to unequivocally demonstrate that putative palytoxin and ovatoxin-a contained in field samples were actually produced by O. ovata itself.