Ran out? can help with that wolfy. And no worries, wasn't going into specifics, merely pointing out the way the noxious crap in fiddleheads acts, you can draw your own conclusions from that data well enough.
Fucking poor rotten unfortunate bastards, starving to death whilst having food to eat. Rough way to go, I bet it was slow as hell before it killed those explorers.
And as for do I have a use for thiaminase? as it happens, methinks I may well just do. Would be neat to try an enzymatic synthesis of chlormethiazole, for the cleavage step to replace bisulfite/metabisulfite, and save me an annoying, tedious, stinky sulfurous workup and tons of sulfur dioxide to deal with. If I could do it enzymatically it would be perfectly clean, just heat sufficiently afterwards to denature the thiaminase, and no nothing, as far as working the intermediate thiazolylethanol up is concerned.
Theres TONS of bracken round here. I'd sooner use a fern species that doesn't contain ptaquiloside though, or cyanide. The cyanide I can deal with but those illudanes are fucking heinously toxic. I'd need to make DAMN sure it didn't follow through, distil the chlormethiazole freebase, check it by TLC etc.
Intrigiungly enough, ptaquiloside shows great structural similarity with a pair of toxins from the mycological sphere, illudin-S and illudin-M, from mushrooms in the genus Omphalotus, the jac;'o'lanterns, so called for the eerie green glow of the bioluminescent gills. Although I haven't ever seen any of them in the wild, Omphalotus olearius grows here in the UK, but its very, very VERY rare, with only a handful of recorded sightings in the UK. They are primarily a genus of hotter countries, that species associates itself with olive trees mainly iirc, but theres a host tree available in the UK, oak i think, or possibly sweet chestnut.
Won't kill if eaten usually if ever, but they do make unfortunate pickers that mistake them for the edible and very tasty chanterelle, but those never have true gills, merely forked, shallow pseudogills, just ribs baring the fertile hymenium, where Omphalotus all have very decurrent true gills, and always grow on wood, which the chanterelle does not ever do., the interesting bit, is that the illudins (not illudANES on the whole, but specifically illudin-S and illudin-M were looked at as lead compounds in the search for new anticancer stuff.
Makes me wonder if the pharm companies thought to examine ptaquiloside in a high throughput screening