V-ToCs (Venom Toxin Clustering): A tool for the investigation of sequence and structure similarities in snake venom toxins.

Autor: Kalogeropoulos K; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Rosca V; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., O'Brien C; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Christensen CR; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Grahadi R; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark; Department of Biology, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia., Sørensen CV; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Overath MD; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Espi DR; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Jenkins DE; BettercallPaul, Munich, Germany., Keller UAD; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Laustsen AH; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Fryer TJ; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark., Jenkins TP; Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark. Electronic address: tpaje@dtu.dk.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Toxicon : official journal of the International Society on Toxinology [Toxicon] 2024 Nov 06; Vol. 250, pp. 108088. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Aug 31.
DOI: 10.1016/j.toxicon.2024.108088
Abstrakt: Recently, there has been a major push toward the development of next-generation treatments against snakebite envenoming. However, unlike current antivenoms that rely on animal-derived polyclonal antibodies, most of these novel approaches are reliant on an in-depth understanding of the over 2000 known snake venom toxins. Indeed, by identifying similarities (i.e., conserved epitopes) across these different toxins, it is possible to design cross-reactive treatments, such as broadly-neutralising antibodies, that target these similarities. Therefore, in this project, we built an automated pipeline that generates sequence and structural distance matrices and homology trees across all available snake venom toxin sequences and structures. To facilitate analysis, we also developed a user-friendly and high-throughput visualisation tool, coined "Venom TOxin CluStering" (V-ToCs). This tool allows researchers to easily investigate sequence and structure patterns in snake venom toxins for a wide array of purposes, such as elucidating toxin evolution, and will also hopefully help guide the discovery and development of increasingly broadly-neutralising antivenoms in the near future.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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