Department of Genetics, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, USA.
Museum of Natural Sciences and Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.
Mol Ecol Resour. 2024 Nov;24(8):e14020. doi: 10.1111/1755-0998.14020. Epub 2024 Sep 19.
Snake venoms are complex mixtures of toxic proteins that hold significant medical, pharmacological and evolutionary interest. To better understand the genetic diversity underlying snake venoms, we developed VenomCap, a novel exon-capture probe set targeting toxin-coding genes from a wide range of elapid snakes, with a particular focus on the ecologically diverse and medically important subfamily Hydrophiinae. We tested the capture success of VenomCap across 24 species, representing all major elapid lineages. We included snake phylogenomic probes in the VenomCap capture set, allowing us to compare capture performance between venom and phylogenomic loci and to infer elapid phylogenetic relationships. We demonstrated VenomCap's ability to recover exons from ~1500 target markers, representing a total of 24 known venom gene families, which includes the dominant gene families found in elapid venoms. We find that VenomCap's capture results are robust across all elapids sampled, and especially among hydrophiines, with respect to measures of target capture success (target loci matched, sensitivity, specificity and missing data). As a cost-effective and efficient alternative to full genome sequencing, VenomCap can dramatically accelerate the sequencing and analysis of venom gene families. Overall, our tool offers a model for genomic studies on snake venom gene diversity and evolution that can be expanded for comprehensive comparisons across the other families of venomous snakes.
蛇毒是复杂的有毒蛋白质混合物,具有重要的医学、药理学和进化意义。为了更好地了解蛇毒的遗传多样性,我们开发了 VenomCap,这是一种针对广泛的眼镜蛇科蛇类毒素编码基因的新型外显子捕获探针集,特别关注生态多样且具有重要医学意义的海蛇亚科。我们在 24 个代表主要眼镜蛇科谱系的物种中测试了 VenomCap 的捕获成功率。我们在外显子捕获集中包含了蛇类基因组探针,这使我们能够比较毒液和基因组位点的捕获性能,并推断出眼镜蛇科的系统发育关系。我们证明了 VenomCap 能够从大约 1500 个目标标记中回收外显子,这些标记总共代表了 24 种已知的毒液基因家族,其中包括在眼镜蛇科蛇毒中发现的主要基因家族。我们发现,VenomCap 的捕获结果在所有取样的眼镜蛇科中都是稳健的,特别是在海蛇亚科中,在目标捕获成功率(匹配的目标基因座、灵敏度、特异性和缺失数据)方面都是如此。作为全基因组测序的一种具有成本效益且高效的替代方法,VenomCap 可以大大加速毒液基因家族的测序和分析。总的来说,我们的工具为蛇毒基因多样性和进化的基因组研究提供了一个模型,该模型可以扩展到对其他毒蛇家族的全面比较。