Bioprospection of animal toxins with biotechnological interest through omic tools

Abstract

Poisons and venoms are source of biologically active molecules that can be used as medicine. Despite the great variety of molecules with biotechnological application, it is still difficult to develop them, due to the small amount of starting material, low purification yield and high cost of the traditional purification methodology, which explains the small number of animal molecules currently used as drugs. Therefore, the advent and further increment of omic tools are paving the new state of art, once its use allows the researches to have an overview of the whole venom or poison composition. In addition, the transcriptome technique associated with cloning and heterologous expression enables the production of enough quantity of molecules from the gland or specialized tissue for structural and functional analysis. Therefore, these studies facilitate the use of molecules with significant biological activity. In order to validate the activity of recombinant proteins, structural, functional and comparative tests between native and recombinant molecules are relevant and may be designed to study functional and structural characteristics. Therefore, this project aims the bioprospection toxins with potential application of neglected species. Several assays will be performed for this purpose, as transcriptomes and proteomes construction, mass fingerprinting assays, cloning and expression of heterologous proteins and functional and structural tests for native toxins from R. schneideri toad and P. villosa ant C. d. terrificus snake, and scorpion secretions. (AU)