title: Atractaspis aterrima toxins: the first insight into the molecular evolution of venom in side-stabbers.
abstract: Although snake venoms have been the subject of intense research, primarily because of their tremendous potential as a bioresource for design and development of therapeutic compounds, some specific groups of snakes, such as the genus Atractaspis, have been completely neglected. To date only limited number of toxins, such as sarafotoxins have been well characterized from this lineage. In order to investigate the molecular diversity of venom from Atractaspis aterrima-the slender burrowing asp, we utilized a high-throughput transcriptomic approach completed with an original bioinformatics analysis pipeline. Surprisingly, we found that Sarafotoxins do not constitute the major ingredient of the transcriptomic cocktail; rather a large number of previously well-characterized snake venom-components were identified. Notably, we recovered a large diversity of three-finger toxins (3FTxs), which were found to have evolved under the significant influence of positive selection. From the normalized and non-normalized transcriptome libraries, we were able to evaluate the relative abundance of the different toxin groups, uncover rare transcripts, and gain new insight into the transcriptomic machinery. In addition to previously characterized toxin families, we were able to detect numerous highly-transcribed compounds that possess all the key features of venom-components and may constitute new classes of toxins.
authors.affiliation: Montréal University, Research Institute in Plant Biology, Montreal Botanical Garden, Montreal, Québec, Canada. yves.terrat@umontreal.ca.
authors.forename: Yves
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Terrat
authors.forename: Kartik
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sunagar
authors.forename: Bryan G
authors.initials: BG
authors.lastname: Fry
authors.forename: Timothy N W
authors.initials: TN
authors.lastname: Jackson
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Scheib
authors.forename: Rudy
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fourmy
authors.forename: Marion
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Verdenaud
authors.forename: Guillaume
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Blanchet
authors.forename: Agostinho
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Antunes
authors.forename: Frederic
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ducancel
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology; D018076:DNA, Complementary / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011487:Protein Conformation; D012641:Selection, Genetic; D012910:Snake Venoms / Q000235:genetics* / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D012911:Snakes; D059467:Transcriptome
chemical_list: D018076:DNA, Complementary; D012910:Snake Venoms