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.
