Scorpion Venom Gland Transcriptomics and Proteomics: An Overview

Abstract

Recently, the OMIC technologies of proteomics and transcriptomics have been extensively applied to deeply understand the structure and molecular diversity of animal venoms from various species including scorpions. During the last decade, proteomics analysis of 27 different scorpion species has been conducted and revealed the complexity of scorpion venoms. Mass fingerprinting data clearly showed noticeable differences in the number of venom molecules (ranging from 60 to 665) between scorpion species. Also, as a complementary approach, the transcriptomics analysis of venom glands from 20 different scorpion species resulted in about 73,000 assigned ESTs which mainly correspond to neurotoxins, antimicrobial peptides, housekeeping proteins, hypothetical proteins, and a large number of unassigned types of scorpion venom peptides or proteins. The employment of transcriptomics in scorpion venomics is adding new insights about venom diversity and biological processes of venom gland as well as facilitating the identification of various novel biologically active peptides. In this chapter, scorpion gland transcriptomics will be mainly discussed with a brief introduction about scorpion venom and its proteomics analysis.