Team:NCTU Formosa/Model

Software—Toxin selection

I. Purpose

To prove the concept of Pantide, we wanted to select three existing distinct spider toxin peptides with probable oral toxicity against the testee－Spodoptera litura(Tobacco cutworms). For the actual application of Pantide we, we needed some more knowledge base of peptides which have different molecular targets to promote Pantide applying to other orders of insects, and a different toxic mechanism to regularly alternate so as to avoid drug resistance.

To date, about 1500 toxin peptides from 97 spider species have been studied, though the number of spider toxin peptides is conservatively estimated up to 10 million. [1] So, our purpose is to establish a database collecting the information of those peptides, such as molecular target, taxon, toxicity, sequence. According to the database, if we first choose a target insect, then we can easily find out groups of suitable peptides used as Pantide. Therefore, we also need to create a method to select peptides from the database.

II. Method

The method of toxin selection can be separated into three part: crawler, filter, and selection.

  • Toxin Collection—we planned to collect information of toxin peptides to establish our own database for Pantide from protein databases and some research results like taxon and toxicity from published papers.
  • Toxin Filtering—based on background knowledge of toxin peptides, we set up some conditions to filter out those unsuitable to use as Pantide.
  • Toxin Processing—we used online protein analyze tools to classify the remained peptides into groups by their similarity. Finally, we select out three distinct peptides from different groups to proof concept of Pantide.

III. Step 1: Crawler

IV. Step 2: Filter

V. Step 3: Selection

VI. Future