Enzymes in spider venom have bioeco­nom­ic potential

With around 52,000 spe­cies world­wide, spiders are par­tic­u­larly diverse and pro­duce the most com­plex of all anim­al venoms: the venom of only a single spe­cies can con­tain more than 3,000 molecules. These belong mainly to the group of small neur­o­tox­ins and are used to over­power insects. A team of research­ers from the LOEWE Centre TBG at the Fraunhofer Insti­tute for Molecu­lar Bio­logy and Applied Eco­logy, branch of Biore­sources (IME-BR) in Giessen, Ger­many, has now invest­ig­ated the pre­vi­ously neg­lected com­pon­ents of spider venom and dis­covered some­thing sur­pris­ing. In their study, they show that in addi­tion to neur­o­tox­ins the heav­ily invest­ig­ated spider venom also con­tains a wide vari­ety of enzymes. Their res­ults have been pub­lished in the journ­al ​“npj Biod­iversity”, which is part of the ​“Nature” group of journals.

“In the past, a few pion­eer­ing stud­ies sug­ges­ted the pres­ence of enzymes in spider venoms, but a tar­geted search for them has nev­er been car­ried out. We took on this task and sys­tem­at­ic­ally screened the raw data of all so far venom-wise ana­lysed spiders for enzymes. We were able to show that there are in fact more than 140 dif­fer­ent enzyme fam­il­ies in their venom,” explains study lead­er Dr. Tim Lüd­decke, head of the Anim­al Venom­ics work­ing group at the IME-BR and the Jus­tus Liebig Uni­ver­sity in Giessen. ​“This means, among oth­ers, that we have dra­mat­ic­ally under­es­tim­ated the chem­ic­al diversity of spider venoms so far, as all cal­cu­la­tions of com­plex­ity are based on the neur­o­tox­ins alone.”

Accord­ing to the authors, the res­ults of the work not only enable new research approaches to bet­ter under­stand the evol­u­tion and func­tion of spider venoms, but also open new per­spect­ives for their use. ​“Enzymes are key build­ing blocks of the bioeconomy. They accel­er­ate chem­ic­al reac­tions and are char­ac­ter­ised by very low by-product form­a­tion, low energy con­sump­tion and bio­de­grad­ab­il­ity. They can there­fore be used to cre­ate value in a highly sus­tain­able way. Industry is there­fore con­stantly look­ing for new sources of enzymes,” explains Josephine Dresler, PhD stu­dent in the work­ing group and first author of the study. ​“Some of the enzymes we have iden­ti­fied could be used in deter­gents or waste man­age­ment, for example, because of their fat-split­ting or pro­tein-degrad­ing prop­er­ties. They could make a sig­ni­fic­ant con­tri­bu­tion to a sus­tain­able trans­form­a­tion there,” says Dresler.

The work of the Giessen sci­ent­ists high­lights the trans­la­tion­al poten­tial hid­den in anim­al venoms, espe­cially those of spiders. ​“So far, the spider venom com­munity has focused exclus­ively on med­ic­al or agri­cul­tur­al applic­a­tions. Our dis­cov­ery opens up the pos­sib­il­ity of estab­lish­ing a com­pletely new field of applied research,” explains Lüd­decke. ​“But we are only at the begin­ning, as less than one per cent of all spider spe­cies have been stud­ied for their venoms. I am con­fid­ent that we will make more excit­ing dis­cov­er­ies in the remain­ing 99 per cent of the world’s spider fauna!”

Pub­lic­a­tion:

Josephine Dresler, Volk­er Herzig, Andreas Vil­c­in­skas, Tim Lüd­decke. ​„Enlight­en­ing the tox­ino­lo­gic­al dark mat­ter of spider venom enzymes” https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​0​3​8​/​s​4​4​1​8​5-024 – 00058‑2