Enlighting the toxinological dark matter of spider venom enzymes
Dresler, J.; Herzig, V.; Vilcinskas, A.; Lueddecke, T.
Show abstract
Spiders produce highly adapted venoms featuring a complex mixture of biomolecules used mainly for hunting and defense. The most prominent components are peptidic neurotoxins, which have been the focus of research and drug development, whereas venom enzymes have been largely neglected. Nevertheless, investigation of venom enzymes not only reveals insights into their biological functions, but also provides templates for future industrial applications. Here we compared spider venom enzymes contained in the VenomZone database and in other publicly available proteo-transcriptomic datasets. We found extensive discrepancies between these sources, revealing a previously unrecognized abundance and diversity of venom enzymes. Furthermore, we assigned the reported enzymes to cellular processes and known venom functions, including toxicity, prey pre-digestion, venom preservation, venom component activation, and venom spreading factors. Our study reveals a gap between databases and publications in terms of enzyme coverage which impedes development of new applications based on the rich and diverse spectrum of enzymes contained in spider venom.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Loss of a major venom toxin gene in a Western Diamondback rattlesnake population 94%
- Selection for imperfection: A review of asymmetric genitalia in araneomorph spiders (Araneae: Araneomorphae) 93%
- Purification and molecular characterization of phospholipase, antigen 5 and hyaluronidases from the venom of the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) 93%
Similar papers in this journal
- Intraspecific venom variation in the medically important puff adder (Bitis arietans): comparative venom gland transcriptomics, in vitro venom activity and immunological recognition by antivenom 93%
- Two snakebite antivenoms have potential to reduce Eswatini's dependency upon a single, increasingly unavailable product: results of preclinical efficacy testing 93%
- High throughput screening and identification of coagulopathic snake venom proteins and peptides using nanofractionation and proteomics approaches 92%
Similar papers in this journal
- Draft genome sequences of Hirudo medicinalis and salivary transcriptome of three closely related medicinal leeches 95%
- Transcriptome of the synganglion and characterization of the cys-loop ligand-gated ion channel gene family in the tick Ixodes ricinus. 93%
- Distinct regulatory networks control toxin gene expression in elapid and viperid snakes 92%
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.