Animal toxins: what features differentiate pore blockers from gate modifiers

Abstract

A surprisingly large number of animal toxins target voltage sensitive ion channels. Even though there exists toxins for all four major voltage sensitive ion channels, a majority act either on sodium or potassium channels. Given a specific primary sequence, the challenge is to determine in an automated fashion whether a given substance is toxic, and what its site of action might be. Currently, there are signals such as functional dyads that are indicative of a toxin, but are not yet specific enough to allow accurate prediction of the site of action. In this paper, an automated approach for detecting whether a toxin acts on voltage-sensitive sodium versus potassium channels is presented. In addition, our consensus sequence is also able to reliably determine whether the toxin acts as a gate modifier or pore blocker (> 93% accuracy).