Discovery and characterization of a family of insecticidal neurotoxins with a rare vicinal disulfide bridge
- 1 June 2000
- journal article
- Published by Springer Nature in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
- Vol. 7 (6) , 505-513
- https://doi.org/10.1038/75921
Abstract
We have isolated a family of insect-selective neurotoxins from the venom of the Australian funnel-web spider that appear to be good candidates for biopesticide engineering. These peptides, which we have named the Janus-faced atracotoxins (J-ACTXs), each contain 36 or 37 residues, with four disulfide bridges, and they show no homology to any sequences in the protein/DNA databases. The three-dimensional structure of one of these toxins reveals an extremely rare vicinal disulfide bridge that we demonstrate to be critical for insecticidal activity. We propose that J-ACTX comprises an ancestral protein fold that we refer to as the disulfide-directed beta-hairpin.Keywords
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