Pteridium aquilinum: a threat for biodiversity, and animal and human health

Interest and goals

Pteridium aquilinum is a fern that is widely distributed throughout the world, which belonged to open forest communities long before the human impact occurred in forests and landscapes. Today, the fern prevalence has expanded considerably, partly due to human activity in land use, but also due to the fern's natural aggressiveness towards competing herbs and trees. Climate change seems to favor the spread of this plant, due to rising temperatures, and wetter conditions in combination with more hours of sunshine, that together increase its growth period. This fern shares traits of many invasive species, such as extensive vegetative reproduction (underground rhizome system), ecological amplitude, climate-adaptive, tolerant to a wide range of edafic conditions, self-fertilizing spores, and low degree of herbivorous/pathogenic pressure. In addition, this fern has a vast chemical arsenal capable of preventing both the establishment of competing plants, and the harassment of mammals and insects. The most studied compounds are cyanogenic glycosides (prunasine and vicina), illudane glycosides (ptaquoloside, caudatoside, ptesculentoside), pterosins (more than a dozen) and selligueain, a germination inhibitor. There is a large-scale temporal and spatial variation of these compounds, indicating the presence of chemotypes. The contents of these compounds are often quite high, measured both as concentration in biomass, and as amount of toxin per unit area, and this is a disturbing result from a health and environmental perspective. Among all these toxins, illudane glycosides have received increased attention, as they seem to be the cause of tumor development in livestock (urinary bladder cancer; bovine enzootic hematuria), and also in humans (gastric cancer in people who eat it in the diet), reasons why WHO/IARC have classified Pteridium as "possible human carcinogen" (Group 2B). Likewise, epidemiological studies indicate a higher prevalence of gastric cancer in areas with many ferns, although they are not used for consumption. Apparently, in this case, the exposure source might be the milk and/or meat from cows that eat ferns, the inhalation of spores/dust, and the drink of water contaminated by leaching of fern toxins into soils and aquifers, because several studies have shown the presence of, at least, ptaquiloside in milk, spores and surface and groundwater. In Spain, the Autonomous Regions Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country, together with Extremadura, represent a heterogeneous phytogeographic arc in which the fern stands out for its considerable abundance, and characterized by the extensive and intensive exploitation of cattle and sheep; therefore, the presence of this plant might be a very important risk both to animal production and animal and human health. However, there are no data on the expansion of this plant in the last years, nor about the toxin contents in Pteridium plants in these regions. Thus, there are not reliable data about risk. Furthermore, there is nor information about a possible relationship between toxin content and carcinogenic effect, or with the effect on DNA damage induction, that is the carcinogenicity origin. Because of these reasons, we think that it is necessary, and especially urgent, to open a research area to in deep study the Pteridium situation in our country.

Contact

Although only some of the researchers involved in this project have been starting to study the threat that Pteridium represents for aspects as important as biodiversity, and health of livestock and people living around these plants and, therefore, exposed to their toxicity, we have put together a team, with experts on different fields, capable to cope with each of the goals proposed, as indicated by the following research information: Dra. Elena Mª Fernández González is Associate Professor in the Area of Plant Physiology, at the University of Oviedo. She has focussed all her career to different topics on ferns, by using biotechnological tools, such as in vitro culture techniques, which provides an important background on the vegetative and reproductive biology of the gametophyte generation. Moreover, she has been trained in chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (HPLC & GC), phytohormonal analyses, and lastly in proteomic studies. In the last years, proteomic data from gametophytes of the apogamous fern Dryopteris affinis ssp. affins have been reported for the first time, which has contributed to get acquaintance with probable biological functions for more than one thousand proteins, with important repercussion in evolution and developmental studies, reproduction, phytohormone signalling and biosynthesis, and biotic and abiotic stress, among others metabolic processes. Dra. Luisa María Sierra Zapico is Associate Professor in the Area of Genetics, at the University of Oviedo. She has expended all her academic career studying the effects of exposure to chemicals that induced DNA damage, in terms of DNA damage detection, its repair and its consequences (gene and chromosomal mutations), that is DNA damage response, using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster to carry out in vivo analyses, and human cell lines to carry out in vitro ones. Dr. Juan Pedro Majada Guijo, PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Oviedo. Stays at INRA and CNRS in Bordeaux. He worked for several years as a consultant in Portugal for the multinational Stora-Enso, developing breeding programmes and industrial production systems. He joined in 2002, with a Ramón y Cajal contract of the INIA system, the Agri-Food Research and Development Service of Asturias and, in 2008, he was hired under the state programme I3, by the Principality of Asturias, for the creation and development of the Forestry and Wood Technology Centre, of which he has been the director since 2009. He is author of more than seventy SCI publications and has participated in numerous funded projects, several of them as PI of the national R&D plan. Dr. Elena Canga Líbano PhD. Researcher at CETEMAS (Forest and Wood Technology Research Centre Foundation). Research areas: forest growth, forest planning, fire risk, pest and diseases & geomatics. Her research focuses on the following aims: 1) forest growth modelling, 2) forest management, 3) forest planning, 4) LiDAR and multispectral analysis with different objectives (forest growth, health, fire risk, etc.). Part-time instructor in Degree in Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Oviedo, in the following courses: Reforestation and Restoration of degraded land, Management of Protected Areas, and Management of Threatened Species. Dr. José Manuel Alvarez Díaz is Assistant Professor (Profesor Contratado Doctor) at the University of Oviedo. He has skills in Plant Physiology and Biotechnology. He has extensive research experience in plant development, functional characterization of candidate genes in homologous and heterologous systems, and bioinformatics analyses. He is an expert in forestry. Dr. Isabel Díaz Feito PhD in Biology, currently researcher at SERIDA, integrates the necessary knowledge in the processes of plant development combined with an applied view, result of more than 20 years of experience in the field of Horticulture, Floriculture and Forests, with topics such as nutrition, pests and other aspects of interest in an Integrated Management and Sustainable Agriculture. Her research in the field of Plant Physiology, focusing on the study of Hormonal Metabolism and the participation of Plant Growth Regulators as inducers of the signal cascade that regulates the interaction of plants with their environment allowed to getting acquaintance in several analytical techniques, like mass spectrometry LC/MS. Recent relevant publications: Dr. Elena María Fernández 2022. Jonhson M, Fernández H, Kumar A, Shibila T (eds.). Ferns: Biotecnology. Micropropagation, Medicinal uses and Environmental regulation. Springer-Singapore. https://link.springer.com/book/9789811661693 2022. Fernández H and Sierra L. María. Pteridium aquilinum: a threat for biodiversity and human and animal health. In: Jonhson M, Fernández H, Kumar A, Shibila T (eds.). Ferns: Biotecnology. Micropropagation, Medicinal uses and Environmental regulation. Springer-Singapore. https://link.springer.com/book/9789811661693 2021. Fernández H, Grossmann J, Gagliardini V, Feito I, et al. Sexual and apogamous species of woodferns show different protein and phytohormonal profiles. Frontiers in Plant Science. 12 November. 2020. Wyder S, Rivera A, Valdés AE, et al. Differential gene expression profiling of one- and two-dimensional apogamous gametophytes of the fern Dryopteris affinis ssp . affinis. Plant Physiol Biochem 148:302–311. doi: 10.1016/j.plaphy.2020.01.021 2021. Barredo B. Analysis of the possible genotoxicity of water from troughs surrounded by Pteridium aquilinum, in Drosophila melanogaster in vivo. Project End of Degree. Dpts. BOS and Functional Biology. University of Oviedo. 2021. San Juan J. Genotoxicity of plant extracts from Pteridium aquilinum in Drosophila melanogaster in vivo. Project End of Degree. Dpts. BOS and Functional Biology. University of Oviedo. 2018. Fernández H. Current Advances in Fern Research. Ed. Springer. NY ISBN 978-14-4197-161-6 2017. Grossmann J, Fernández H, Pururawa M Chauvey et al. Proteogenomic analyses greatly expands the identification of proteins *Fernández H has collaborated in the publication of Skarbic et al. 2021, doing the sampling work in the spots included from Spain. See Acknowlegments in the paper. Dr. Luisa María Sierra 2022.Fernández H and Sierra L. María. Pteridium aquilinum: a threat for biodiversity and human and animal health. In: Jonhson M, Fernández H, Kumar A, Shibila T (eds.). Ferns: Biotecnology. Micropropagation, Medicinal uses and Environmental regulation. Springer-Singapore. https://link.springer.com/book/9789811661693. 2021. Fernández Asensio, A., E. Álvarez-González, A. Rodríguez, L.M. Sierra, E. Blanco-González. Chromatographic methods coupled to mass spectrometry for the determination of oncometabolites in biological samples- A Review. Analytica Chimica Acta 1177: 338646. Doi: 10.1016/j.aca.2021.338646. 2021. Fernández-Villabrille, S., E. Álvarez-González, F. Barros, P. De La Peña, L.M. Sierra. Influence of Kv11.1 (hERG1) K+ channel expression on DNA damage induced by the genotoxic agent methyl methanesulfonate. Pflügers Archiv - Eur J Physiol 473:197–217. Doi: 10.1007/s00424-021-02517-2. 2019. Fernández Asensio, A., L.M. Sierra, M. Montes-Bayón, E. Blanco-González. Sensitive determination of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) by immuno-polymerase chain reaction with inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry detection. Analytica Chimica Acta 1090: 39-46. Doi: 10.1016/j.aca.2019.09.047. 2018. Fernández Asensio, A., T. Iglesias, A. Cotarelo, M. Espina, E. Blanco-González, L.M. Sierra, M. Montes-Bayón. 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