Tarantula Toxins Offer Key Insights Into Neuroscience of Pain

Summary: Researchers discover two toxins isolated from tarantula venom that may be able to help block pain.

Source: UCSF.

Toxins extracted from ornamental baboon tarantula may be used as tools to study disorders ranging from irritable bowel syndrome to epilepsy.

When your dentist injects lidocaine into your gums, the drug blocks the pain of the oncoming drill, but it also blocks all other sensation – leaving your mouth feeling numb and swollen. What if there were a drug that could specifically block pain, but leave the rest of your sensations alone? In order to do this, you would need to find a way to control the cohort of nerve fibers that transmit the specific type of pain you would like to block.

A research team led by UC San Francisco scientists has discovered molecules that may help researchers do just that: two toxins isolated from the venom of Heteroscodra maculata, a West African tarantula the size of your hand (commonly referred to as the “ornamental baboon” or “Togo starburst” tarantula). This spider’s massive fangs deliver a poison that causes excruciating pain in part by triggering a specific kind of sodium channel within A-delta nerve fibers, according to the new research.

The study was led by researchers in the lab of David Julius, PhD, Chair of the Department of Physiology at UCSF, and was published June 6, 2016 in the journal Nature.

The researchers are excited about this finding for two equally important reasons: for opening a new chapter in our understanding of pain, and because the new toxins can now be used as a highly selective tool for manipulating this type of sodium channel, which also has been implicated in neurological disorders unrelated to pain, from epilepsy to autism to Alzheimer’s disease.

“It’s a good problem to have,” said Jeremiah Osteen, PhD, the postdoctoral fellow in Julius’s group who led the research team. “We didn’t know which of the two findings we should be more excited about.”

Poisonous Creatures Reveal Tools for Pain, Neurological Research

Julius’s lab – which is renowned for the discovery and characterization of the so-called “wasabi receptor” – has recently been working to identify new pain pathways by screening more than a hundred different venoms from poisonous spiders, scorpions, and centipedes — sourced from the collection of co-author Glenn F. King, PhD, of the University of Queensland in Australia — all of which have evolved chemical defenses that target the biology of animals’ pain nerves.

“There are dozens to hundreds of different active peptides in each animal’s venom,” Julius said. “The deeper you look the more toxins there seem to be.”

The Togo starburst tarantula’s venom struck them as being particularly interesting because it appeared to activate a particular type of sodium channel within sensory nerves that was not a part of known pain pathways.

To identify which of the dozens of chemicals that made up the tarantula’s venom were specifically targeting these channels, the researchers separated the venom and applied the components one-by-one to rodent sensory neurons in a lab dish. They found two peptide molecules that specifically and powerfully activated these sensory nerves, and experiments with lab-synthesized versions of the same molecules confirmed that these chemicals could activate pain-sensing neurons on their own.

Experiments with an array of different drugs that block candidate receptor molecules demonstrated that the two toxins specifically bind to and demonstrated that this particular receptor is indeed found on A-delta nerves in mice.

The accepted notion is that A-delta fibers may convey the sharp, immediate shock of a burn or a cut, ahead of the burning throb conveyed by slower C fibers. The newly discovered tarantula peptides allowed the researchers to isolate A-delta fibers in mice, and show that they also appear to play a role in touch hypersensitivity – when normally innocuous light touch causes discomfort – a type of pain common to diseases like shingles and many chronic pain syndromes.

Nine Subtly Different Voltage-Sensitive Sodium Channels

Additional experiments also implicated heightened touch sensitivity of Nav1.1-expressing nerves in a mouse model of irritable bowel syndrome, suggesting these nerves, and this channel, may play a role in the chronic discomfort such patients experience.

The pharmacological aspect of the research is also exciting for researchers because the nine subtly different voltage-sensitive sodium channels that are critical for nervous system function are extremely hard to manipulate individually. Researchers have been on a decades-long quest to find selective drugs for each subtype, so identifying two in one spider is a valuable find.

Image shows a West African tarantula.
A Heteroscodra maculata, a West African tarantula. NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from the UCSF press release.

“These channels are incredibly hard to identify drugs for because the different subtypes are closely related, making it difficult to identify drugs or other agents that act on one subtype and not another,” Julius said. “These toxins provide unique tools to start understanding exactly what this particular subtype, Nav1.1, does in terms of pain sensation.”

The Nav1.1 subtype in particular has been implicated in the development of diseases including epilepsy, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease, and the researchers hope that in addition to helping scientists understand the biology of pain, the new discovery will lead to the development of new drugs to target these diseases.

“These spiders had millions of years of evolution to come up with these potent and specific toxins,” Osteen said. “They’re tools one might be hard pressed to design as well in the lab.”

About this pain research article

Additional UCSF authors on the paper were Joshua J. Emrick, Chuchu Zhang, Xidao Wang, PhD, and Allan I. Basbaum, PhD. Please see the paper online for a full list of authors and their contributions.

Funding: This work was supported by a T32 Postdoctoral Training Grant from the UCSF CVRI (J.D.O.), Ruth Kirschstein NIH postdoctoral (F32NS081907 to J.D.O.) and predoctoral (F31NS084646 to J.G. and F30DE023476 to J.J.E.) fellowships, the National Institutes of Health (R37NS065071 and R01NS081115 to D.J., R01NS091352 to F.B., R01NS040538 and R01NS070711 to C.L.S., and R37NS014627 and R01DA29204 to A.I.B.), the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (Project Grant APP1083480 to S.M.B., Program Grant APP1072113 and Principal Research Fellowship APP1044414 to G.F.K.), and a grant from the Wellcome Trust to A.I.B. S.M.B. is a NHMRC R.D Wright Biomedical Research Fellow.

Source: Nicholas Weiler – UCSF
Image Source: This NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from the UCSF press release.
Original Research: Abstract for “Selective spider toxins reveal a role for the Nav1.1 channel in mechanical pain” by Jeremiah D. Osteen, Volker Herzig, John Gilchrist, Joshua J. Emrick, Chuchu Zhang, Xidao Wang, Joel Castro, Sonia Garcia-Caraballo, Luke Grundy, Grigori Y. Rychkov, Andy D. Weyer, Zoltan Dekan, Eivind A. B. Undheim, Paul Alewood, Cheryl L. Stucky, Stuart M. Brierley, Allan I. Basbaum, Frank Bosmans, Glenn F. King and David Julius in Nature. Published online June 6 2016 doi:10.1038/nature17976

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]UCSF. “Tarantula Toxins Offer Key Insights Into Neuroscience of Pain.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 7 June 2016.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/neurotoxin-pain-tarantula-4402/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]UCSF. (2016, June 7). Tarantula Toxins Offer Key Insights Into Neuroscience of Pain. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved June 7, 2016 from https://neurosciencenews.com/neurotoxin-pain-tarantula-4402/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]UCSF. “Tarantula Toxins Offer Key Insights Into Neuroscience of Pain.” https://neurosciencenews.com/neurotoxin-pain-tarantula-4402/ (accessed June 7, 2016).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]


Abstract

Selective spider toxins reveal a role for the Nav1.1 channel in mechanical pain

Voltage-gated sodium (Nav) channels initiate action potentials in most neurons, including primary afferent nerve fibres of the pain pathway. Local anaesthetics block pain through non-specific actions at all Nav channels, but the discovery of selective modulators would facilitate the analysis of individual subtypes of these channels and their contributions to chemical, mechanical, or thermal pain. Here we identify and characterize spider (Heteroscodra maculata) toxins that selectively activate the Nav1.1 subtype, the role of which in nociception and pain has not been elucidated. We use these probes to show that Nav1.1-expressing fibres are modality-specific nociceptors: their activation elicits robust pain behaviours without neurogenic inflammation and produces profound hypersensitivity to mechanical, but not thermal, stimuli. In the gut, high-threshold mechanosensitive fibres also express Nav1.1 and show enhanced toxin sensitivity in a mouse model of irritable bowel syndrome. Together, these findings establish an unexpected role for Nav1.1 channels in regulating the excitability of sensory nerve fibres that mediate mechanical pain.

“Selective spider toxins reveal a role for the Nav1.1 channel in mechanical pain” by Jeremiah D. Osteen, Volker Herzig, John Gilchrist, Joshua J. Emrick, Chuchu Zhang, Xidao Wang, Joel Castro, Sonia Garcia-Caraballo, Luke Grundy, Grigori Y. Rychkov, Andy D. Weyer, Zoltan Dekan, Eivind A. B. Undheim, Paul Alewood, Cheryl L. Stucky, Stuart M. Brierley, Allan I. Basbaum, Frank Bosmans, Glenn F. King and David Julius in Nature. Published online June 6 2016 doi:10.1038/nature17976

Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.
Join our Newsletter
I agree to have my personal information transferred to AWeber for Neuroscience Newsletter ( more information )
Sign up to receive our recent neuroscience headlines and summaries sent to your email once a day, totally free.
We hate spam and only use your email to contact you about newsletters. You can cancel your subscription any time.