"Venom toxins" refers to harmful substances produced by certain animals or insects, called venomous creatures, that can cause different types of damage or possibly kill their prey or attackers.
Full definition
The researchers propose that adding insulin to the mix
of venom toxins enabled predatory cone snails to disable entire schools of swimming fish with hypoglycemic shock.
Now, researchers report that they have devised nanoparticles that sop up a variety of common
venom toxins in test tube studies, a key stride in coming up with the first ever broad - spectrum snake antivenom.
These adaptations include the massive and rapid expansion of gene families that
produce venom toxins, providing the snake with a highly toxic protein mixture required to overcome a variety of different prey and also circumvent any resistance to venom that may have developed in such prey.
Armed with the both the king cobra and Burmese python genome the team was able to show that, despite previous hypotheses that venom genes evolve «early» in the lineage leading to snakes, venom gene families do not duplicate early, in fact the study shows that the rapid and extensive expansion of functionally
important venom toxin families is restricted to the venomous «advanced» snake lineage.
This can involve different genes housed in the genome being turned on or off in different snakes at different stages of
venom toxin production.
The idea that the
same venom toxins that cause harm may also be used to heal is not new.
But the findings suggest that the wasps don't need mutations in
the venom toxin genes to switch from one host to another, or to keep pace with their current hosts.
«These findings raise important questions relating to the processes that other venomous animals may have used to generate
their venom toxins,» wroteNicholas Casewell, senior lecturer and Wellcome Trust research fellow with the Alistair Reid Venom Research Unit at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, in a summary dispatch published alongside the Current Biology paper.
Sometimes, however, those changes alter the protein in such a way that it becomes a useful toxin — and voilà,
a venom toxin is born.