Abstract
This short essay pretends to make the reader reflect on the concept of biological mass and on the added value that the determination of this molecular property of a protein brings to the interpretation of evolutionary and translational snake venomics research. Starting from the premise that the amino acid sequence is the most distinctive primary molecular characteristics of any protein, the thesis underlying the first part of this essay is that the isotopic distribution of a protein's molecular mass serves to unambiguously differentiate it from any other of an organism's proteome. In the second part of the essay, we discuss examples of collaborative projects among our laboratories, where mass profiling of snake venom PLA2 across conspecific populations played a key role revealing dispersal routes that determined the current phylogeographic pattern of the species.
Highlights
This short essay pretends to make the reader reflect on the concept of biological mass and on the added value that the determination of this molecular property of a protein brings to the interpretation of evolutionary and translational snake venomics research
We are so familiar with the intuitive Newtonian notion of ‘mass’ as a proxy for quantity of matter that we do not stop to think about all the conceptual complexity of this fundamental quality of everything around us that moves at subluminal speed
We focused on PLA2s because due to its size (13– 14 kDa) and absence of post-translational modifications, the monoisotopic molecular mass can be accurately derived both in silico and experimentally determined using most of the available benchtop mass spectrometry systems [19]
Summary
This short essay pretends to make the reader reflect on the concept of biological mass and on the added value that the determination of this molecular property of a protein brings to the interpretation of evolutionary and translational snake venomics research. In the second part of the essay, we discuss examples of collaborative projects among our laboratories, where mass profiling of snake venom PLA2 across conspecific populations played a key role revealing dispersal routes that determined the current phylogeographic pattern of the species.
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