ArticleScientific reports2015
Target-Driven Evolution of Scorpion Toxins.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Scorpio fuscus venom as a promising anticancer agent against colorectal cancer.Investigational new drugs · 2026Article
- Evolution of Phospholipase A2 in Bees and Flies.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Venomous Noodles: The Evolution of Toxins in Nemertea through Positive Selection and Gene Duplication.Toxins · 2023Article
- Article
- Neglected Venomous Animals and Toxins: Underrated Biotechnological Tools in Drug Development.Toxins · 2021Review
- Armed stem to stinger: a review of the ecological roles of scorpion weapons.The journal of venomous animals and toxins including tropical diseases · 2021Review
- Scorpion Toxins: Positive Selection at a Distal Site Modulates Functional Evolution at a Bioactive Site.Molecular biology and evolution · 2019Article
- Receptor variability-driven evolution of snake toxins.Zoological research · 2018Article
- Large Scale Analyses and Visualization of Adaptive Amino Acid Changes Projects.Interdisciplinary sciences, computational life sciences · 2018Article
- The chemical armament of reef-building corals: inter- and intra-specific variation and the identification of an unusual actinoporin in Stylophora pistilata.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Target-Specificity in Scorpions; Comparing Lethality of Scorpion Venoms across Arthropods and Vertebrates.Toxins · 2017Article
- Positive selection in cathelicidin host defense peptides: adaptation to exogenous pathogens or endogenous receptors?Heredity · 2017Article
- Small Packages, Big Returns: Uncovering the Venom Diversity of Small Invertebrate Conoidean Snails.Integrative and comparative biology · 2016Article
- Article
- Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is long known that peptide neurotoxins derived from a diversity of venomous animals evolve by positive selection following gene duplication, yet a force that drives their adaptive evolution remains a mystery. By using maximum-likelihood models of codon substitution, we analyzed molecular adaptation in scorpion sodium channel toxins from a specific species and found ten positively selected sites, six of which are located at the core-domain of scorpion α-toxins, a region known to interact with two adjacent loops in the voltage-sensor domain (DIV) of sodium channels, as validated by our newly constructed computational model of toxin-channel complex. Despite the lack of positive selection signals in these two loops, they accumulated extensive sequence variations by relaxed purifying selection in prey and predators of scorpions. The evolutionary variability in the toxin-bound regions of sodium channels indicates that accelerated substitutions in the multigene family of scorpion toxins is a consequence of dealing with the target diversity. This work presents an example of atypical co-evolution between animal toxins and their molecular targets, in which toxins suffered from more prominent selective pressure from the channels of their competitors. Our discovery helps explain the evolutionary rationality of gene duplication of toxins in a specific venomous species.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.