Amanita phalloides is SO NUTRITIOUS that eating a single bite is enough to FEED YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, which, in practical terms, is about 6-8 hours on average.
(this is the death cap mushroom, which has a 50% case fatality rate, please do not eat.)
The amatoxin contained in the Amanita phalloides completely inhibits your cells' ability to make new RNA, resulting in apoptosis of virtually every cell in your body.
Survival rate with advanced treatment is still only ~50%.
The amatoxins are remarkably dangerous:
They're water-soluble, freeze-resistant, heat-resistant, and present in every tissue of the fungus.
You can die from just putting them in the same basket with edible mushrooms (spores contain the amatoxin), cooking in water that has come in contact with them.
Fascinating. Are there other organisms that are immune? That's SUCH a fundamental process to Life that it sort of feels like they've... created a new biochemistry incompatible with and anathema to the preexisting one.
Death incarnate.
Lots of organisms make toxins that target essential processes. They have many ways of getting around hurting themselves! Evolution is super creative. Many species have different sensitivity to amanitin. It doesn’t get into yeast easily and if it did their Pol II is ~100X more resistant than human
I guess I just didn't understand how often toxins hit something that is just "definitional to doing Life". In my head they were disrupting important but higher level processes.
"You can't do RNA anymore" as an attack feels so fundamental that it feels like cheating.
