Exhaustive extraction of cyclopeptides from Amanita phalloides: guidelines for working with complex mixtures of secondary metabolites

Understanding plant-insect interactions is an active area of research in both ecology and evolution. Much attention has been focused the impact of secondary metabolites in the host plant or fungi on these interactions. Plants and fungi contain a variety of biologically active compounds, and the secondary metabolite profile can vary significantly between individual samples. However, many experiments characterize the biological effects of only a single secondary metabolite or a subset of these compounds.
Here, we develop an exhaustive extraction protocol using an accelerated solvent extraction protocol to recover the complete suite of secondary metabolites found in Amanita phalloides (death cap mushrooms) and compare its efficacy to the ‘Classic’ extraction method used in earlier works.
We demonstrate that our extraction protocol recovers the full suite of secondary metabolites in A. phalloides unlike the ‘Classic’ method that favors polar secondary metabolites.
Based on these fi...