This species releases toxins to the water column
that produce various toxicological responses (Brooks
et al., 2010). Prymnesins is a term generally used to
describe the various toxins released by P. parvum
(Manning and La Claire, 2010), although more recent
studies have begun examining toxicity associated with
fractions from P. parvum cultures that apparently do not
contain prymnesins (Schug et al., 2010). In fact, it
appears that P. parvum produces other allelochemicals
(Henrikson et al., 2010) which differ greatly from structures
reported for the prymnesins