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Dichapetalum cymosum
Also called Poisonleaf, Ratbane
Poison leaf (gifblaar) is a small, low-growing woody shrub from dry parts of southern Africa, sometimes called a plant of the dry sandy savannah. It is notorious for killing livestock, so it is not a plant to grow in a home garden.
Dichapetalum cymosum, commonly known as gifblaar in Afrikaans or occasionally by its English translation, poison leaf, is a small prostrate shrub in the family Dichapetalaceae, native to northern parts of Southern Africa. It is notable as a common cause of lethal cattle poisoning in this region and is considered one of the "big 6" most toxic plants to cattle in South Africa. A 1996 estimate of plant poisonings in South Africa attributed 8% of all cattle mortality caused by poisonous plants to gifblaar. The majority (70%) of fatal cases are in Limpopo province, with 10% each in North West, Mpumalanga, and Gauteng. The primary toxic principal is fluoroacetate, used to synthetically produce the mammal poison Compound 1080, and occurs in all parts of the plant.
The toxic compound isolated as the cause of gifblaar poisoning is fluoroacetate, which was first isolated by Marais in 1944. The LD50 of this compound is 0.5 mg/kg, which means that about 200 grams of dry plant material is sufficient to kill a 500 kg cow. The compound itself is not toxic but undergoes lethal synthesis in the body while reacting with coenzyme A, yielding fluoroacetyl-Coenzyme A. This compound then reacts with oxaloacetate to form fluorocitrate, which is toxic, being a competitive substrate for aconitase (whose normal substrate is citrate). It binds irreversibly to the aconitase but cannot be released, disrupting the Krebs cycle and thus severely inhibiting cellular respiration. Furthermore, fluorocitrate, unlike citrate, cannot cross from the cytoplasm into the mitochondria, where citrate is needed. It is instead degraded in the cytoplasm.
Dichapetalum cymosum itself is resistant to the toxic effects since it contains high levels of the enzyme fluoroacetyl-CoA thioesterase which hydrolyses any fluoroacetyl-Coenzyme A produced back to fluoroacetic acid and Coenzyme A.
Gifblaar occurs in dry, sandy areas in acidic soils, as well as the northern slopes of rocky hills in the southern parts of the African savannah biome. In South Africa, the distribution is within the so-called "gifblaar triangle", the points of which are Mmabatho; Middelburg, Mpumalanga; and Musina. The traditional southern border of gifblaar's distribution is the Magaliesberg mountains. It also occurs in an isolated region in the far north of KwaZulu-Natal. Gifblaar is also found in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and southern Angola. It is typically accompanied in its habitat by other characteristic flora which can be used as indicator species to identify veld which potentially harbours gifblaar; this veld is called "gifveld" by farmers of the region. These accompanying species include Burkea africana, Terminalia sericea, and Ochna pulchra, and also the shrub Parinari capensis. The latter two species are commonly mistaken for gifblaar.
Dichapetalum gelonioides · Dichapetalum madagascariense · Dichapetalum
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Dichapetalum cymosum by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
