Talk:Abrus precatorius

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how is abrin extracted?

"Boiling the seeds in milk and drying will remove the toxic effect" claim should be treated with extreme skepticism

I added a citation needed and dubious tag to this sentence until it is referenced. We're talking about a deadly poison here. Maybe doing this will detoxify the poison, but readers ought to be mighty, mighty careful about believing such a claim.--Hokeman (talk) 23:55, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • According to this boiled seeds of A. precatorius are eaten in parts of the world, and this section states that the when heated to 80°C for 30 minutes that abrin loses most of its toxicity. If this information is accurate it makes the earlier statement far more likely. 74.185.237.43 (talk) 03:06, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Maybe you should learn to read accurately? This is the exact citation: "Boiled seeds of Abrus precatorius are eaten in certain parts of India (Rajaram& Janardhanan, 1992).". As you can see the statement is "India" NOT "the world", which to me (though I strongly doubt just me) makes alot of difference!--Hodeken (talk) 09:43, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • This is the traditional use of the seeds before they are used in Indian medicine ( for a vast a ray of complaints. the toxin is poorly absorbed especially from whole seeds

michaelMichael Bailes (talk) 09:45, 9 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    • The explanations are given on the page for Ricin, the protein chains are bound by a double sulphur bridge. It is proven that this bridge is broken around 80ºC. Boiling the seeds in water or milk (15 minutes for ricin and jatropha, 30 for abrus precatorius) is necessary to pass thru the hard shell, which are waterproof (enough water to pass through is a trigger for germination in nature). Like ricin, the seed-shell is not digested and "gets out" intact, which makes bird-propagation possible, and makes intoxication with the complete seed (i.e. not bitten) very unlikely. Actually, the bright-red color is made to trick the birds into eating the seed. roasting the seed after boiling it is not necessary, it's a matter of taste (just like peanuts). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marabiloso (talk • contribs) 13:55, 1 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Citations in "Uses" section

Citations needed/citation style has to be corrected in the last para of this section. (.......In Northern India The seeds are usually used in worship of Sri Salagrama Representing Srimati Radharani[citation needed]. In the Gaudiya Vaisnava History, it is known that Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu Would Compare the Gunja Seeds of that to Srimati Radharani's feet.[4][5]....)

''Prabhakar Sarma Neog'' (talk) 16:29, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Conflicting information regarding ingestion of intact seeds

under Toxicity, the article states that

"Ingesting the intact seeds typically results in no clinical findings, as they pass through the gastrointestinal tract due to their hard shell."

but also:

"Ingesting a single seed can kill an adult human."

it appears that the entire last paragraph of that section is unsourced. - Pikabun91 (talk) 20:41, 14 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, it's multi-sourced, and it's more like a reformulation of what is already in the article about abrin and ricin, but do we have to repeat all the sources already used elsewhere in the same article to put a reference behind each and every reformulation?

Let me be cynical to be clear: the colour is merely a bait with no reward, while most fruit (or fruit-like such as strawberries) provide sugar in "exchange" for the transport, but all seeds are designed to work that way in nature.

Here, if the shell remains intact, the poison doesn't leak and the seed is "excreted" in the same state it was ingested. In the struggle for life, seeds with a too-thin shell kill their host (gene is lost), too-thick never reach the conditions (water) to germinate (gene is lost).

The poison is necessary for something else related to defence and may vary in other species (some Jatropha are even edible as-is), but not in abrus precatorius: death is a must, anything different didn't work so well in history. The current design is to transport the gene all the way from one end to the other as long as the shell is intact, any breach means the death of the gene and... the host, that has become totally useless. Chewing the shell provokes such breach.

Doing so with Ricin or Jatropha is known to be much more merciful (sort of...), chewing the shell brings you to a near-death-experience for 1 seed (5 chewed ricin seeds kills any heathy adult, according to ricin), but abrin is proven 5 times more effective in binding cells and overall 75 times more toxic[1]: no mercy, by design, and the design is the best-working so far -- gene-wise.

Definitely, these were never meant to be human-worn decorations... popq %rsi (talk) 08:31, 13 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ http://www.asanltr.com/newsletter/01-4/articles/Abrin&RicinRev.htm

Arecoline

There is a set of veterinary course notes floating around about this plant with the phrase "Treatment can be attempted with arecoline" (the stuff from betel nuts). No other information is given. I don't see any obvious reason why, and there are many statements there is no treatment, and I can't find anything on PubMed, and I strongly suspect this is simply a foul-up in somebody's course notes. But if anyone happens to luck across some publication that this could treat it somehow, it would be good to add. Wnt (talk) 11:52, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Cultural Significance section Citation needed flag

There is a "citation needed" flag in the Cultural Significance section for the line mentioning the Wang Wei poem "相思“. Since the line is linked to the Wang Wei article which quotes the poem with citations and external sources, I am not sure how one could better cite the statement except to repeat the same references here on this page. Peter Wisner (talk) 23:47, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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