is the functional diversity of snake toxins associated with a mechanism of accelerated evolution?
Recent studies revealed that animal toxins with unrelated biological functions often possess a similar architecture. To tentatively understand the evolutionary mechanisms that may govern this principle of functional prodigality associated with a structural economy, two complementary approaches were considered. One of them consisted of investigating the rates of mutations that occur in cDNAs and/or genes that encode a variety of toxins with the same fold. This approach was largely adopted with phospholipases A2 from Viperidae and to a lesser extent with three-fingered toxins from Elapidae and Hydrophiidae. Another approach consisted of investigating how a given fold can accommodate distinct functional topographies. Thus, a number of topologies by which three-fingered toxins exert distinct functions were investigated either by making chemical modifications and/or mutational analyses or by studying the three-dimensional structure of toxin-target complexes. This review shows that, although
Related Questions
- How does evolution through natural selection result in changes in biodiversity through the increase or decrease genetic diversity within a population?
- is the functional diversity of snake toxins associated with a mechanism of accelerated evolution?
- Do structural deviations between toxins adopting the same fold reflect functional differences?
