Abstract
The word venomics was coined to acknowledge the studies that use omics to investigate venom proteins and peptides. Venomics has evolved considerably over the last 20 years. The first works on scorpion or spider venomics were published in the early 2000’s. Such studies relied on peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) to characterize venom complexity. After the introduction of new mass spectrometers with higher resolution, sensitivity and mass accuracy, and the next-generation nucleotide sequencing, the complexity of data reported in research on scorpion and spider venomics increased exponentially, which allowed more comprehensive studies. In the present review article, we covered key publications on scorpion venomics and spider venomics, presenting historical grounds and implemented technologies over the last years. The literature presented in this review was selected after searching the PubMed database using the terms “(scorpion venom) AND (proteome)” for scorpion venomics, and “(spider venom) AND (proteome)” for publications on spider venomics. We presented the key aspects related to proteomics in the covered papers including, but not restricted to, the employed proteomic strategy (i.e., PMF, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, shotgun/bottom-up and/or top-down/peptidome), and the type of mass spectrometer used. Some conclusions can be drawn from the present study. For example, the scorpion genus Tityus is the most studied concerning venomics, followed by Centruroides; whereas for spiders the studied genera were found more equally distributed. Another interesting conclusion is the lack of high throughput studies on post-translational modifications (PTMs) of scorpion and spider proteins. In our opinion, PTMs should be more studied as they can modulate the activity of scorpion and spider toxins.
Highlights
Venomous animals have one or more venom glands, and they usually have a specialized apparatus to inject the venom into their prey or use it for defense
We focused on studies describing the New-World venomics, it is important to highlight that a number of venomic studies from Old-World scorpions have been published [91,95–101]
We presented in this review historical landmarks of venomic studies on scorpion and spider venoms
Summary
Venomous animals have one or more venom glands, and they usually have a specialized apparatus to inject the venom into their prey or use it for defense. Scorpions and spiders (phylum Arthropoda, subphylum Chelicerate, class Arachnida) have their bodies divided into cephalothorax and abdomen. Scorpions have their venom apparatus located at the last abdomen segment named telson. There are 2,200 known scorpion species distributed over 19 families but the most studied one is the Buthidae (Koch, 1837), as it accounts for 95% of all reported scorpion accidents [1–4]. The New-World genera include mainly Centruroides (Marx, 1890) and Tityus (Koch, 1836). Spiders use their venom for predation and defense. Widow spider (Latrodectus sp.) bites are painful and may lead to systemic manifestations, including nausea, headache, fatigue and injuries in the cardiac tissue [18]. We will present recent advances in bioinformatics and proteomics that can assist in studying the proteome of scorpion and spider venoms
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