Isolation and Preliminary Characterization of Proteinaceous Toxins with Insecticidal and Antibacterial Activities from Black Widow Spider (L. tredecimguttatus) Eggs

Toxins

Qian Lei¹  Hai Yu¹  Xiaozhen Peng²  Shuai Yan²  Jirong Wang²  Yizhong Yan²  Xianchun Wang¹ 

[1] Key Laboratory of Protein Chemistry and Developmental Biology of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China;

关键词: black widow spider;    egg;    proteinaceous toxin;    fractionation;    characterization;    L. tredecimguttatus;    antibacterial;    insecticidal;   

DOI  :  10.3390/toxins7030886

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The eggs of black widow spider (L. tredecimguttatus) have been demonstrated to be rich in toxic proteinaceous components. The study on such active components is of theoretical and practical importance. In the present work, using a combination of multiple biochemical and biological strategies, we isolated and characterized the proteinaceous components from the aqueous extract of the black widow spider eggs. After gel filtration of the egg extract, the resulting main protein and peptide peaks were further fractionated by ion exchange chromatography and reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography. Two proteinaceous components, named latroeggtoxin-III and latroeggtoxin-IV, respectively, were purified to homogeneity. Latroeggtoxin-III was demonstrated to have a molecular weight of about 36 kDa. Activity analysis indicated that latroeggtoxin-III exhibited neurotoxicity against cockroaches but had no obvious effect on mice, suggesting that it is an insect-specific toxin. Latroeggtoxin-IV, with a molecular weight of 3.6 kDa, was shown to be a broad-spectrum antibacterial peptide, showing inhibitory activity against all five species of bacteria tested, with the highest activity against Staphylococcus aureus. Finally, the implications of the proteinaceous toxins in egg protection and their potential applications were analyzed and discussed.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.