Snake venomics, antivenomics, and venom phenotyping: The ménage à trois of proteomic tools aimed at understanding the biodiversity of venoms

Abstract

This review covers the application of proteomic protocols (venomics, antivenomics, and venom phenotyping) to studying the composition and natural history of snake venoms, and the crossreactivity of antivenoms against homologous and heterologous venoms. Toxins from the same protein family present in venoms from snakes belonging to different genera often share antigenic determinants. This circumstance offers the possibility of defining the minimal set of venoms containing the epitopes necessary to generate therapeutic broad-range polyvalent antisera. Recent work shows how the knowledge of evolutionary trends along with venom phenotyping may be used to replace the traditionally used phylogenetic hypothesis for antivenom production strategies by cladistic clustering of venoms based on proteome phenotype and immunological profile similarities.