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Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on December 6, 2005
Bioinformatics 2006 22(3):264-268; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti811
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Lateral gene transfer of a dermonecrotic toxin between spiders and bacteria

Matthew H. J. Cordes 1,* and Greta J. Binford 2,*

1Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
2Department of Biology, Lewis and Clark College Portland, OR 97219, USA

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Motivation: Spiders in the genus Loxosceles, including the notoriously toxic brown recluse, cause severe necrotic skin lesions owing to the presence of a venom enzyme called sphingomyelinase D (SMaseD). This enzyme activity is unknown elsewhere in the animal kingdom but is shared with strains of pathogenic Corynebacteria that cause various illnesses in farm animals. The presence of the same toxic activity only in distantly related organisms poses an interesting and medically important question in molecular evolution.

Results: We use superpositions of recently determined structures and sequence comparisons to infer that both bacterial and spider SMaseDs originated from a common, broadly conserved domain family, the glycerophosphoryl diester phosphodiesterases. We also identify a unique sequence/structure motif present in both SMaseDs but not in the ancestral family, supporting SMaseD origin through a single divergence event in either bacteria or spiders, followed by lateral gene transfer from one lineage to the other.

Contact: cordes{at}email.arizona.edu; binford{at}lclark.edu

Received on September 25, 2005; revised on November 23, 2005; accepted on December 1, 2005

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