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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VIPS (Venomics In Predator-prey Systems)

Teaser

Summary

VIPS research aims at understanding the biochemical basis of the predator-prey relationship in corals and corallivorous snails. Corals are venomous animals that produce complex venom delivered to preys or predators through specialized stinging cells, the nematocysts. Given their toxicity, only a few organisms have acquired the ability to feed on corals. Among them, VIPS project targets marine snails of the subfamily Coralliophilinae, which include species associated with a range of diverse corals, known to produce bioactive peptides and proteins as well in their foregut glands.
Main aims of VIPS project include:
- The identification of main bioactive components contained in the venom produced in the nematocysts of the corals and in the foregut glands of the snails
- The clarification of the evolutionary role of venom diversification in predators and preys
- The elucidation of mechanism of action of venom components from predators and preys, and their interaction at the molecular level
The results will lead to a better understanding of the chemically mediated trophic interactions in the marine realm. Furthermore, novel bioactive venom peptides were discovered, some of which may have relevant activities for pharmacological, agro-chemical and bioengineering developments, with significant potential impacts on human health.

Work performed

Most of the work performed during the implementation of VIPS was carried out in order to enable the Researcher to get specific training in laboratory techniques and bioinformatics analyses, and manage independently the experimental approaches required in the project.
The Researcher obtained good quality transcriptomic and proteomic data for different foregut glands of Coralliophila brevis feeding on the seafan Eunicella singularis and of Coralliophila meyendorffii feeding either on the zoantharian Parazoanthus axinellae and on the stony coral Astroides calycularis, along with the whole body transcriptomes and nematocyst proteomes of their coral preys. This set of samples will allow evaluating the biochemical trophic adaptation both at the intra-specific and at the inter-specific level.
Main results obtained include the description of biochemical diversity of predators and preys: these results were presented in international congresses, and are the subject of two manuscripts in preparation. We are currently investigating the activity of selected venom peptides of the preys and modelling in silico their interaction with a set of predator-specific proteins and peptides.
We also found out that the secretion produced in the salivary glands of C. meyendorffyi vary greatly according with its prey; this is true both at the transcriptomic and at the proteomic level, suggesting that diet may trigger gene expression in the salivary gland. These findings are now in preparation for publication.

Final results

Venomics is an emerging discipline that is developing at a fast pace, due to significant technological improvements in HPLC, MS, NGS and electrophysiology that were developed not before the late 2000s, but not yet fully exploited for venom characterization. Particularly, the use of differential expression analyses to discover toxins belonging to novel groups/families has been not yet pursued in venomics.
Historically, venom research has been focusing mostly on a few species of medical interest while the predator-prey systems which are the target of VIPS project have not been explored to date with respect to their chemical ecology. Most gastropods bioactive compounds, including the ones produced by corallivorous species, are not known to science. On the prey side, even if Anthozoan toxins have been more extensively studied, the target species of VIPS project have not been investigated yet. This is especially true for E. singularis, as proteinaceous secretions are poorly studied in the whole subclass Octocorallia.
More importantly, VIPS project represent a conceptual innovation with respect to previous venom research, since predator and prey species are tackled simultaneously in a same research plan. This strategy will be straightforward to define the activity and the molecular interactions of their bioactive compounds, and to elucidate their adaptive and evolutionary role. A surprisingly low number of studies have investigated to date the evolutionary mechanisms driving diversification at the molecular level, especially in marine predator-prey systems.
The knowledge gained in the VIPS project reveals the importance of molecular adaptations in shaping trophic ecology in marine predator-prey systems. Furthermore, some of the venom peptides we identified, especially in the corals, act as ion channels modulators that are worth of further investigation as potential drug leads.