Exon Shuffling and Origin of Scorpion Venom Biodiversity

Scorpion venom is a complex combinatorial library of peptides and proteins with multiple biological functions. A combination of transcriptomic and proteomic techniques has revealed its enormous molecular diversity, as identified by the presence of a large number of ion channel-targeted neurotoxins w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Toxins 2017-01, Vol.9 (1), p.10-10
Main Authors: Wang, Xueli, Gao, Bin, Zhu, Shunyi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Antimicrobial peptides
Biodiversity
Combinatorial analysis
exon shuffling
exon-intron structure
Exons
Gene Library
Gene sequencing
Genes
Introns
Ion channels
Libraries
molecular diversity
Neural coding
Neurotoxins
Neurotoxins - chemistry
Neurotoxins - genetics
Nucleotide sequence
Nucleotides
Peptides
Peptides - chemistry
Protease inhibitors
Protein arrays
Protein Conformation
Proteinase inhibitors
Proteins
Proteomics
Pyridine nucleotide reductase
Recombination, Genetic
Recruitment
Regulatory sequences
scorpion venom
Scorpion Venoms - chemistry
Scorpion Venoms - genetics
Scorpions
Toxins
Transcriptome
Venom
Venom gland
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Summary:Scorpion venom is a complex combinatorial library of peptides and proteins with multiple biological functions. A combination of transcriptomic and proteomic techniques has revealed its enormous molecular diversity, as identified by the presence of a large number of ion channel-targeted neurotoxins with different folds, membrane-active antimicrobial peptides, proteases, and protease inhibitors. Although the biodiversity of scorpion venom has long been known, how it arises remains unsolved. In this work, we analyzed the exon-intron structures of an array of scorpion venom protein-encoding genes and unexpectedly found that nearly all of these genes possess a phase-1 intron (one intron located between the first and second nucleotides of a codon) near the cleavage site of a signal sequence despite their mature peptides remarkably differ. This observation matches a theory of exon shuffling in the origin of new genes and suggests that recruitment of different folds into scorpion venom might be achieved via shuffling between body protein-coding genes and ancestral venom gland-specific genes that presumably contributed tissue-specific regulatory elements and secretory signal sequences.
ISSN:2072-6651
2072-6651
DOI:10.3390/toxins9010010