The super-range effect of the alterconstructed communication mediate plays a key role in the evolution of scorpion toxin structure and function.

On December 18th, Zhu Shunyi, a team from the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published an online research paper entitled Scorpion toxin: positive selection at a distal site sein version a tha a' bioactive site, revealing for the first time the key role of the superson effect of variable communication-mediated hyperscorpional effects (action at a distance) in the structure and function of scorpion toxins.
many previous studies have shown that positive selection of bioactive sites of proteins drives the evolution of genetic diversity.
however, the evolutionary and functional significance of positive selection sites far from the bioactive region is unclear.
2016, one of their studies found that scorpion alpha-type neurotoxins specifically targeting sodium channels in insects and mammals had a rapidly evolving non-biologically active site (site 52) at the far end of the positively selected bioactive site region (directly binding to the sodium channel) (see photo).
in the study, the team used fixed-point mutation techniques, combined with structural analysis, electrophysiological experiments, and live toxicity determination techniques, and for the first time found that the introduction of different types of amino acids at different scorpion alpha-type neurotoxin sites 52 could selectively alter the structure and function of these toxins.
molecular dynamics simulation, it is found that this far-end site mutation can induce the morphomorphism effect to cause the structural dynamics of the toxin bioactive site region to change, and thus cause functional differentiation.
this result suggests that the evolution of the far end site is closely related to the positive selection of biologically active sites.
statistical conjugate analysis further reveals the coevolutionary relationship between them.
the study demonstrates the over-range effect between the toxin's internal sites and the co-production of mutation-mediated compensation as an adaptive strategy for toxic animals to cope with the pressure of prey/predator selection (see figure).
these findings provide a new way of thinking for understanding the basis of the activity of inner life of scorpion toxin and the biochemical mechanisms of molecular evolution, and help advance the evolutionary research direction of protein functionality focusing on far-right selection site mutations. The first author of the
thesis is Julie Mei, a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Animals. Gao Bin, a senior engineer at
Labs, and Yuan Shouli, a doctoral student, participated in the study.
researcher Zhu Shunyi is the author of the newsletter.
the research work is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Source: Animal Research Institute.