Special Issue "Spider Venoms"

Guest Editor
Dr. Greta J. Binford
Department of Biology, Lewis & Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd. Portland, Oregon 97214, USA
Website: http://legacy.lclark.edu/~binford/
E-Mail: binford@lclark.edu
Phone: +1 503-768-7653
Fax: +1 503-768-7658
Interests: spider venom chemical diversity; mechanisms of venom evolution; phylogenetic patterns of venom diversity

Guest Editor
Dr. Pierre Escoubas
VenomeTech, Valbonne, France
E-Mail: escoubas@venometech.com

Dear Colleagues,

Spider venoms are a treasure trove of chemical and pharmacological diversity. Over 41,000 described species of spiders have evolved from a common ancestor that lived at least 350 million years ago. Since that time, spider venoms have been evolving as predatory tools in the context of diversifying tactics of prey capture. The end products are thus extraordinarily refined cocktails comprising hundreds of toxins endowed with exquisite selectivity and affinity. As the size of these vast biochemical stores may be up to forty million components, they represent a truly phenomenal potential for discovery. Yet venoms of only a few scattered twigs on the spider family tree have been analyzed and less than 1500 toxins described. Even fewer have been well characterized but nevertheless show immense promise as drug leads for pathologies ranging from pain to erectile dysfunction. Modern methods for proteome and transcriptome analyses are exponentially increasing the pace of discovery. As we begin to explore divergent spider lineages we are improving understanding of patterns of toxin diversity and the evolutionary processes that have generated it, which will help guide exploration for novel pharmacology. For this special issue we invite contributions from spider venom researchers with foci on a broad range of spider toxin issues, and from an equally broad range of research approaches.

Prof. Dr. Greta J. Binford
Dr. Pierre Escoubas
Guest Editors

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Toxins is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

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• Araneae
• venom
• phylogeny
• peptides
• proteins
• bioactivity
• pharmacology
• drug development
• neurotoxin