Exploring the Proteomics and Functional Genomics of Snake ENVenomation InVivo

Jay W. Fox¹, José Gutiérrez², Solange Serrano³, Teresa Escalante², and Chris Moluskak¹.

1 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA., 2 University of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica, and 3 Instituto Butantan, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Over the past several years our laboratories have reported on the effects of Viperid snake venoms and toxins on tissues using techniques such as microscopy and immunohistochemistry.  More recently we have focused on the proteomics and functional genomics of snake venoms and toxins as well as their effects on cells in tissue culture.  All of these studies have provided considerable insight into the cellular mechanisms associated with venom-induced pathogenesis.  However, until now there was no particularly successful, broadband technology to assess the functional proteomics and functional genomics of envenomation at the level of a tissue in a living organism.  In this lecture we report on the use of laser capture micro-dissection to query changes in gene and protein expression at the site of venom-induced hemorrhage and necrosis in mice.  As expected, some of the results observed corroborate previous data generated using tissue culture models, however, new, previously unobserved changes have been found that further extend our understanding of the effect of envenoming at the level of the tissue/organism.