They don’t look like much under the microscope in an FGCU laboratory: Football- and clam-shaped dots swimming lazily in water.
But these toxic algae from the genus Gambierdiscus cause ciguatera fish poisoning, which affects tens of thousands of people worldwide every year.
Mike Parsons, FGCU professor of marine sciences, and an international team of researchers have received a $4 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a five-year project, the goal of which is to better understand what causes outbreaks of the seafood poisoning.
“Ciguatera is the most common toxic seafood poisoning in the world,” said Parsons, the project’s principal investigator. “Fifty thousand cases a year is a conservative estimate. It’s probably misdiagnosed and under-reported, so there might be hundreds of thousands of cases. We don’t really know.”
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