, 2000; Yan and Adams, 2000). They both are 76 amino acids long, show similar placement of the cysteine residues, and have

overall sequence identity of 70%. These data suggest that the disulfide bonding patterns of the two molecules are likely check details to be very similar; however, there has been no NMR study on either PnTx3-4 or ω-Aga-IIIA to define their three-dimensional structure. Recently Kozlov and Grishin (2005), based on the fact that the majority of spider toxins share similarity in cysteine arrangement and disulfide bridge pattern, developed a new algorithm that reliably predicts the three-dimensional structure of the cysteine knot motif based on primary sequence analysis. Interestingly, these authors showed that PnTx3-4 and ω-Aga-IIIA primary structure conform to all the criteria of a knottin scaffold (Kozlov and Grishin, 2005). p38 MAPK activity An automated modeling procedure is now available for predicting the three-dimensional structure of knottins (Gracy and Chiche, 2010 and Gracy and Chiche, 2011) and a database of structural models for all known knottin sequences is freely accessible from the web site http://knottin.cbs.cnrs.fr. Fig. 7 shows the comparison between the knottin database predicted three-dimensional structures of PnTx3-4 and ω-Aga-IIIA toxins. The two peptides

show remarkable structural similarity (Fig. 7C), not only at the N-terminal end, where they show high sequence similarity, but also at the C-terminus, where the peptides do not show amino acid sequence similarity or conserved localization of cysteine residues (Fig. 1). Based on the fact that the different steps of the homology modeling were carefully optimized using a large set of knottins with known structures and the accuracy of predicted models was shown

to lie between 1.50 and 1.96 Å (Gracy and Chiche, 2010), it is tempting to propose that the predicted model for PnTx3-4 is a close representation of the actual structure of the toxin. In fact, our CD spectrum analysis of the refolded toxin indicated that PnTx3-4 contains predominantly random coil formation, which corroborates the predicted model proposed. The functional expression of recombinant PnTx3-4 and the structural analysis reported here provide the basis for future large scale production and structure-function investigation of this peptide. This work was supported by the “Milenium Institute for development of drugs based Pomalidomide chemical structure on toxins” (Milenio-2005; Brazil; V.F.P., M.A.M. P and M.V.G.), Capes Toxinology Program 1444/2011 and PRONEX-2005 (ABORDAGEM GENETICO-MOLECULAR PARA O ESTUDO DO SISTEMA COLINERGICO; Brazil; V.F.P; M.A.M. P; M.V.G.). Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI, V.F.P & M.A.M.P), the Ontario Research Fund (ORF, V.F.P & M.A.M.P) and the University of Western Ontario (V.F.P. & M.A.M.P.). I. A. Souza received a PhD fellowship from CAPES (Brazil) and an award from the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) – Grant Agreement for Emerging Leaders in the Americas (ELAP).