In Memoriam: Gérard Dupré (1947–2026) — A Life Devoted to the Study of Scorpions

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  Photo Credit: Le Parisien In Memoriam: Gérard Dupré (1947–2026) — A Life Devoted to the Study of Scorpions The passing of Gérard Dupré (1947–2026) is a deeply felt loss for those of us who share an interest in the study of scorpions and other arachnids. Throughout his life, he dedicated himself to documenting and preserving arachnological knowledge, contributing valuable work on scorpion taxonomy, distribution, and bibliography. His careful attention to the literature helped bring clarity and organization to a field whose history spans centuries and many languages. Gérard was also closely associated with the journal Arachnides , which became an important outlet for sharing research, faunistic records, and historical notes within the arachnological community. Through this work, he helped ensure that observations and studies—large and small—were preserved and made accessible to others with similar scientific interests. Beyond his scholarly contributions, Gérard was a humble and gen...

Optimizing Scorpion Toxin Processing through Artificial Intelligence

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Optimizing Scorpion Toxin Processing through Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Scorpion toxins are relatively short cyclic peptides (<150 amino acids) that can disrupt the opening/closing mechanisms in cell ion channels. These peptides are widely studied for several reasons including their use in drug discovery. Although improvements in RNAseq have greatly expedited the discovery of new scorpion toxins, their annotation remains challenging, mainly due to their small size. Here, we present a new pipeline to annotate toxins from scorpion transcriptomes using a neural network approach. This pipeline implements basic neural networks to sort amino acid sequences to find those that are likely toxins and thereafter predict the type of toxin represented by the sequence. We anticipate that this pipeline will accelerate the classification of scorpion toxins in forthcoming scorpion genome sequencing projects and potentially serve a useful role in identifying targets for drug development.

Psenicnik, A., A., A., Graham, M. R., Hassan, M. K., A., M., Sharma, P. P., & E., C. (2024). Optimizing Scorpion Toxin Processing through Artificial Intelligence. Toxins, 16(10), 437. https://doi.org/10.3390/toxins16100437