BASTIAN RAST
Comprising more than 40,000 species—almost all of which produce venom—spiders are a treasure trove of nerve-attacking molecules. “They’re basically little combinatorial peptide libraries walking around on a bunch of legs,” says David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “They’ve had millions of years to evolve peptide sequences that interact with the functionally most important parts of protein targets.”
Those targets are often ion channels in the membranes of pain-sensing neurons. In a recent screen of multiple venoms, Julius’s group identified two toxins from the Togo starburst tarantula (Heteroscodra maculata) that selectively activated the mammalian voltage-gated sodium channel NaV1.1, which behavioral experiments with mice revealed plays a previously unknown role in mechanical pain (Nature, 534:494-99, 2016). The team also characterized one of ...
