ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Phylogenetically diverse diets favor more complex venoms in North American pitvipers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 papers.
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Who cites it
55 citing papers in PubMed, 95 citations in OpenAlex.
- Fish Buffet: Dietary Observations in the Oman Saw-Scaled Viper (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Nature's antivenom: Combinations of conserved rattlesnake serum metalloproteinase inhibitors block the lethal action of viper venoms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Deconstructing cardiovascular and coagulation-related traits links dietary ecology to multi-functional snake venom specificity.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2026Article
- Inter- and Intraspecific Venom Variation in the Reclusive Rear-Fanged Black-Striped Snakes (Toxins · 2026Article
- Venom Variation as a Window into the Ecology and Evolution of Snakes.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Review
- The Golden Lancehead Genome Reveals Distinct Selective Processes Acting on Venom Genes of an Island Endemic Snake.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Proteomic profiling and comparative hemotoxicity ofThe journal of venomous animals and toxins including tropical diseases · 2026Article
- Article
- Molecular mechanisms underlying early functional divergence in snake venom inferred from the genomes of two pitviper lineages.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Life history and chromosome organization determine chemoreceptor gene expression in rattlesnakes.The Journal of heredity · 2025Article
- Article
- Snake Venomics of the Arboreal Talamancan Palm-Pitviper,Journal of proteome research · 2025Article
- The gene regulatory mechanisms shaping the heterogeneity of venom production in the Cape coral snake.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Computational Strategies for Broad Spectrum Venom Phospholipase AJournal of chemical information and modeling · 2025Article
- A Segregating Structural Variant Defines Novel Venom Phenotypes in the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Ambient temperature and toxic diets constrain snake venom resistance in a desert rodent.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Dietary Breadth Predicts Toxin Expression Complexity in the Venoms of North American Gartersnakes.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Article
- A review of the venom microbiome and its utility in ecology and evolution including future directions for emerging research.Symbiosis (Philadelphia, Pa.) · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
23 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The role of natural selection in the evolution of trait complexity can be characterized by testing hypothesized links between complex forms and their functions across species. Predatory venoms are composed of multiple proteins that collectively function to incapacitate prey. Venom complexity fluctuates over evolutionary timescales, with apparent increases and decreases in complexity, and yet the causes of this variation are unclear. We tested alternative hypotheses linking venom complexity and ecological sources of selection from diet in the largest clade of front-fanged venomous snakes in North America: the rattlesnakes, copperheads, cantils, and cottonmouths. We generated independent transcriptomic and proteomic measures of venom complexity and collated several natural history studies to quantify dietary variation. We then constructed genome-scale phylogenies for these snakes for comparative analyses. Strikingly, prey phylogenetic diversity was more strongly correlated to venom complexity than was overall prey species diversity, specifically implicating prey species' divergence, rather than the number of lineages alone, in the evolution of complexity. Prey phylogenetic diversity further predicted transcriptomic complexity of three of the four largest gene families in viper venom, showing that complexity evolution is a concerted response among many independent gene families. We suggest that the phylogenetic diversity of prey measures functionally relevant divergence in the targets of venom, a claim supported by sequence diversity in the coagulation cascade targets of venom. Our results support the general concept that the diversity of species in an ecological community is more important than their overall number in determining evolutionary patterns in predator trait complexity.
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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.