Study of amino acid composition, structure and evolutionary relationships of Disintegrin toxins from Vipera species

Animal venoms contain numerous toxins with various physiological activities that cause problems such as allergic reactions and/or more severe reactions including as blood clots, necrosis, pulmonary arrest. Nevertheless, research has shown these venoms can be used as a medicine for treating many diseases including cancer. Disintegrins are a family of small protein from Vipera species venoms. Studies have shown that these peptides can exhibit anticancer activities by interfering with intracellular signaling pathways. In this study amino acid composition of Disintegrin toxins from different Vipera venoms were studied and phylogenetic relationship between them was depicted. In order to analysis of the sequence and amino acid composition, the sequence of these peptides were obtaianed from NCBI. MEGA6 software was also used to compare of these peptides and phylogenetic studies. In the next step, the structure of some of these peptide were modelled with Modeller and were analyzed by SPDBV. Study of sequence and amino acid composition lead to identification of conserved and important residues involved in the structure and the function these peptides. Phylogenetic analysis showed that disintegrins could also classified in 3 evolutionary groups. Structural analysis also showed that disintegrins with a most recent common ancestor have significant structural similarity which confirm the results obtained from phylogenetic studies.