The production of toxic plant secondary metabolites (phytotoxins) for defense is a widespread phenomenon in the plant kingdom and is even present in agricultural crops. These phytotoxins may have similar characteristics to anthropogenic micropollutants in terms of persistence and toxicity. However, they are only rarely included in environmental risk assessments, partly because a systematic overview of phytotoxins is missing. Here, we present a newly developed, freely available database, Toxic Plants-PhytoToxins (TPPT), containing 1586 phytotoxins of potential ecotoxicological relevance in Central Europe linked to 844 plant species. Our database summarizes phytotoxin patterns in plant species and provides detailed biological and chemical information as well as in silico estimated properties. Using the database, we evaluated phytotoxins regarding occurrence, approximated from the frequencies of Swiss plant species; environmental behavior based on aquatic persistence and mobility; and toxicity. The assessment showed that over 34% of all phytotoxins are potential aquatic micropollutants and should be included in environmental investigations.

Environmental Analytics Agroscope Reckenholzstrasse 191 8046 Zürich Switzerland

Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering ETH Zurich Wolfgang Pauli Strasse 10 8093 Zürich Switzerland

Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics ETH Zurich Universitätsstrasse 16 8092 Zürich Switzerland

RECETOX Masaryk University Kamenice 753 5 625 00 Brno Czech Republic

Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology Überlandstrasse 133 8600 Dübendorf Switzerland

References provided by Crossref.org

The NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE): facilitating European and worldwide collaboration on suspect screening in high resolution mass spectrometry

The LOTUS initiative for open knowledge management in natural products research