title: Accurate prediction of scorpion toxin functional properties from primary structures.
abstract: Scorpion toxins are common experimental tools for studies of biochemical and pharmacological properties of ion channels. The number of functionally annotated scorpion toxins is steadily growing, but the number of identified toxin sequences is increasing at much faster pace. With an estimated 100,000 different variants, bioinformatic analysis of scorpion toxins is becoming a necessary tool for their systematic functional analysis. Here, we report a bioinformatics-driven system involving scorpion toxin structural classification, functional annotation, database technology, sequence comparison, nearest neighbour analysis, and decision rules which produces highly accurate predictions of scorpion toxin functional properties.
authors.affiliation: Laboratories for Information Technology, Knowledge Discovery Department, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore 119613, Singapore.
authors.forename: Paul T J
authors.initials: PT
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.forename: K N
authors.initials: KN
authors.lastname: Srinivasan
authors.forename: Seng Hong
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Seah
authors.forename: Judice L Y
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Koh
authors.forename: Tin Wee
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.forename: Shoba
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ranganathan
authors.forename: Vladimir
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Brusic
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D012604:Scorpion Venoms / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000145:classification / Q000633:toxicity*; D012605:Scorpions / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000502:physiology*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*; D013045:Species Specificity; D013329:Structure-Activity Relationship
chemical_list: D012604:Scorpion Venoms