Bioinformatics for venom and toxin sciences.

Abstract

Venomous animals produce a myriad of important pharmacological components. The individual components, or venoms (toxins), are used in ion channel and receptor studies, drug discovery, and formulation of insecticides. The toxin data are scattered across public databases which provide sequence and structural descriptions, but very limited functional annotation. The exponential growth of newly identified toxin data has created a need for better data management. Venominformatics is a systematic bioinformatics approach in which classified, consolidated and cleaned venom data are stored into repositories and integrated with advanced bioinformatics tools for the analysis of structure and function of toxins. Venominformatics complements experimental studies and helps reduce the number of essential experiments.