Harnessing snake venom cardiotoxins for antimicrobial peptide discovery

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  Harnessing snake venom cardiotoxins for antimicrobial peptide discovery Abstract Snake venoms are a rich source of bioactive molecules with considerable potential for drug discovery. Cardiotoxins (CTXs) from cobras ( Naja spp.) are membrane-active venom proteins and promising templates for antimicrobial peptide development. Here, we combined two computational toxin-mining strategies to identify antimicrobial peptide candidates from CTXs. First, AMPA-guided sequence mining was used to detect encrypted antimicrobial regions within CTX sequences. Second, sequence alignment and consensus-sequence analysis were employed to generate peptides from a conserved CTX scaffold. Candidate peptides were prioritised using multiple machine learning- and deep learning-based antimicrobial peptide prediction tools, resulting in fourteen CTX-inspired peptides, including two modified derivatives of CTX-p5. Antimicrobial screening showed limited activity across the peptide panel, with CTX-p5 exhibiti...

Dispersal limitation shapes distance-decay patterns of European spiders at the continental scale

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Dispersal limitation shapes distance-decay patterns of European spiders at the continental scale

Understanding the processes behind differences in species composition between sites (i.e. beta diversity) is a central question in ecology and biogeography. For this reason, beta diversity patterns have been widely studied across a wide range of territories, scales, times and taxa (e.g. Ávila et al., 2020; Pavlek & Mammola, 2020; Soininen et al., 2007; Steinbauer et al., 2012). At large scales, compositional differences between sites are commonly explained by two major processes, dispersal limitation and species sorting (Nekola & White, 1999; Soininen et al., 2007), which are not mutually exclusive (Gravel et al., 2006). Under dispersal limitation, even if areas with suitable conditions are available, species may not have the capacity to move across the required distances to colonize those areas, so their spatial distributions would not be in equilibrium with environmental conditions. As a result, the more spatially distant two sites are, the more dissimilar their communities are as well (Hubbell, 2001; Nekola & White, 1999). In turn, under species sorting, species are present or absent in a site depending on its biotic and abiotic characteristics (Leibold et al., 2004) and, in consequence, species distributions are constrained by environmental conditions (e.g. climate) and biotic interactions (e.g. competitive exclusion). In this case, the more different the biotic and abiotic characteristics of two sites, the more dissimilar their communities (Nekola & White, 1999).

Martín-Devasa, R., Jiménez-Valverde, A., Leprieur, F., Baselga, A., & Gómez-Rodríguez, C. Dispersal limitation shapes distance-decay patterns of European spiders at the continental scale. Global Ecology and Biogeography. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13810