Department of Biology, Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT 06810, USA.
División Aracnología, Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, Buenos Aires C1405, Argentina.
Toxins (Basel). 2024 Oct 11;16(10):437. doi: 10.3390/toxins16100437.
Scorpion toxins are relatively short cyclic peptides (<150 amino acids) that can disrupt the opening/closing mechanisms in cell ion channels. These peptides are widely studied for several reasons including their use in drug discovery. Although improvements in RNAseq have greatly expedited the discovery of new scorpion toxins, their annotation remains challenging, mainly due to their small size. Here, we present a new pipeline to annotate toxins from scorpion transcriptomes using a neural network approach. This pipeline implements basic neural networks to sort amino acid sequences to find those that are likely toxins and thereafter predict the type of toxin represented by the sequence. We anticipate that this pipeline will accelerate the classification of scorpion toxins in forthcoming scorpion genome sequencing projects and potentially serve a useful role in identifying targets for drug development.
蝎子毒素是相对较短的环状肽(<150 个氨基酸)，可以破坏细胞离子通道的开闭机制。这些肽因其在药物发现中的应用而受到广泛研究。尽管 RNAseq 的改进极大地加速了新蝎子毒素的发现，但它们的注释仍然具有挑战性，主要是由于它们的体积小。在这里，我们提出了一种使用神经网络方法注释蝎子转录组毒素的新管道。该管道实现了基本的神经网络来对氨基酸序列进行排序，以找到那些可能是毒素的序列，然后预测序列所代表的毒素类型。我们预计，该管道将加速即将到来的蝎子基因组测序项目中蝎子毒素的分类，并有可能在确定药物开发的靶点方面发挥有用的作用。
