Back

Microbial adaptation to venom is common in snakes and spiders

Esmaeilishirazifard, E.; Usher, L.; Trim, C.; Denise, H.; Sangal, V.; Tyson, G. H.; Barlow, A.; Redway, K.; Taylor, J. D.; Kremmyda-Vlachou, M.; Davies, S.; Loftus, T. D.; Lock, M. M. G.; Wright, K.; Dalby, A.; Snyder, L. A. S.; Wuster, W.; Trim, S.; Moschos, S. A.

2021-11-05 microbiology
10.1101/348433 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Animal venoms are considered sterile sources of antimicrobial compounds with strong membrane disrupting activity against multi-drug resistant bacteria. However, bite wound infections are common in developing nations. Investigating the oral and venom microbiome of five snake and two spider species, we evidence viable microorganisms potentially unique to venom for black-necked spitting cobras (Naja nigricollis). Among these are two venom-resistant novel sequence types of Enterococcus faecalis; the genome sequence data of these isolates feature an additional 45 genes, nearly half of which improve membrane integrity. Our findings challenge the dogma of venom sterility and indicate an increased primary infection risk in the clinical management of venomous animal bite wounds. One Sentence SummaryIndependent bacterial colonization of cobra venom drives acquisition of genes antagonistic to venom antimicrobial peptides.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"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.