tetrodotoxin

English

Etymology

From German Tetrodotoxin, corresponding to Tetrodon (tetr- +‎ --odon) + toxin.

Noun

tetrodotoxin (countable and uncountable, plural tetrodotoxins)

  1. (neurotoxicology) A neurotoxin, originally discovered in Tetraodontiformes, and found in pufferfish, blue-ringed octopus, etc.
    • 1985, Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Simon & Schuster, page 118:
      Both creatures belong to a large pan-tropical order of fish, many of which have tetrodotoxin in their skin, liver, ovaries, and intestines.
    • 2017 August 9, Mark Carnall, “Why do cephalopods produce ink? And what's ink made of, anyway?”, in The Guardian‎[1]:
      The blue-ringed octopus Hapalochlaena lunulata has tetrodotoxin, the deadly toxin it also releases in a bite, in their ink but the concentrations and effect in inking are not known.
    • 2020 December 4, Ligaya Mishan, “The Appealing and Potentially Lethal Delicacy That Is Fugu”, in The New York Times Style Magazine‎[2], archived from the original on 1 January 2021:
      Among those who think of fugu as merely a distant delicacy, knowledge rarely goes beyond the fish’s infamous trait: In the most delicious species, the innards are suffused with the neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin (TTX).

Synonyms

  • TTX (abbreviation)

Derived terms

  • TTX (abbreviation)

Translations

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.