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. 2022 Feb 28:28:20210034.
doi: 10.1590/1678-9199-JVATITD-2021-0034. eCollection 2022.

Toxinology in the proteomics era: a review on arachnid venom proteomics

Filipi Calbaizer Marchi  1 , Edneia Mendes-Silva  1 , Lucas Rodrigues-Ribeiro  1 , Lucas Gabriel Bolais-Ramos  1 , Thiago Verano-Braga  1
Affiliations

Toxinology in the proteomics era: a review on arachnid venom proteomics

Filipi Calbaizer Marchi et al. J Venom Anim Toxins Incl Trop Dis. .

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.

Keywords: Proteomics; Scorpions; Spiders; Venomics.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Number of publications on scorpion venomics and spider venomics. Results were retrieved from PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) by March 2021 using the following search parameters: “(scorpion venom) AND (proteome)” for scorpion venomics or “(spider venom) AND (proteome)” for spider venomics.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Venomic workflow. General workflows for top-down and bottom-up venomics are presented.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.. Summary of publications on venomics. Interaction map reporting the main terms (arachnid genera, venomic method, mass spectrometry platform, and corresponding author) found in the publications represented in this review. Node size is associated with the frequency that each term appeared in all publications.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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