Abstract
The specificity and potency of venom components give them a unique advantage in developing various pharmaceutical drugs. Though venom is a cocktail of proteins, rarely are the synergy and association between various venom components studied. Understanding the relationship between various components of venom is critical in medical research. Using meta-analysis, we observed underlying patterns and associations in the appearance of the toxin families. For Crotalus, Dis has the most associations with the following toxins: PDE; BPP; CRL; CRiSP; LAAO; SVMP P-I and LAAO; SVMP P-III and LAAO. In Sistrurus venom, CTL and NGF have the most associations. These associations can predict the presence of proteins in novel venom and understand synergies between venom components for enhanced bioactivity. Using this approach, the need to revisit the classification of proteins as major components or minor components is highlighted. The revised classification of venom components is based on ubiquity, bioactivity, the number of associations, and synergies. The revised classification can be expected to trigger increased research on venom components, such as NGF, which have high biomedical significance. Using hierarchical clustering, we observed that the genera’s venom compositions were similar, based on functional characteristics rather than phylogenetic relationships.
Highlights
Venom study has become an integral part of the biomedical research [1] as various venom components have been critical in the development of new pharmaceutical drugs [2]that are potentially useful for the treatment of diabetes, strokes, heart attacks [3,4], and cancer [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
Unlike presence/absence data, we found several new associations, such as phospholipase a2 (PLA2) associated with L-amino acid oxidase (LAAO), C-type lectins (CTL), and nerve growth factor (NGF); SVMP_PIII associated with SVMP_PI, Vasoactive peptide, and bradykinin potentiate peptide (BPP), etc. (Table 6, Figure 7)
Most thethe presence/absence of venom components, we can Throughour ouranalysis, analysis,using using presence/absence of venom components, we discover a total of 562 rulesrules for Crotalus and 25 association rules rules for Sistrurus can discover a total of association
Summary
Venom study has become an integral part of the biomedical research [1] as various venom components have been critical in the development of new pharmaceutical drugs [2]that are potentially useful for the treatment of diabetes, strokes, heart attacks [3,4], and cancer [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Venom study has become an integral part of the biomedical research [1] as various venom components have been critical in the development of new pharmaceutical drugs [2]. Venom is sourced from various venomous organisms, such as snakes, scorpions, spiders, etc. Venomous snakes are distributed mainly in three families: Atractaspidae, Elapidae, Viperidae [13]. Venom from these snake families is highly complex and variable in composition [14,15,16]. The variation in biochemical composition of snake venom can occur between closely related species and within a single species itself [1,17,18,19,20,21,22]. One of the primary reasons for high diversity and plasticity in snake venom is frequent duplication of toxin-encoding genes and recruitment strategies [28,29,30,31,32]
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