Sweet poison: Star fruit neurotoxin identified
Friday, November 22, 2013 - 07:00
in Health & Medicine
(Phys.org) —Patients with kidney disease have to watch what they eat: bananas, oranges, tomatoes, nuts, broccoli, and beans are all off-limits. Putting star fruit or carambola on the menu would be downright dangerous. This fruit contains a substance that is a deadly neurotoxin for people with kidney disease. Brazilian researchers have now isolated and identified this neurotoxin. As they report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, it is an amino acid similar to phenylalanine.