Venoms for good

Facilitator: So, Graham Nicholson, I understand you’re a professor of neurotoxicology and that you're finding ways to use poisons from venomous animals for good. Tell me about what you do.

Graham Nicholson: Essentially, it's applying what we know about the various toxic components within the venom for basically developing potential therapeutic agents or insecticidal agents to benefit mankind.

Facilitator: So give me some examples.

Graham Nicholson: The obvious thing is the area that we work in, which is the development of insecticidal compounds, so taking the components from a variety of sources, predominantly animals that prey upon insects, so they have insecticidal compounds in their venoms and then using that as potential insecticidal sprays to kill pest insects.

They're a really big problem, we lose about close to 20 per cent of our world food production as a result of pest infestations. Already we've got a number of countries that are below the poverty line in terms of food production and if we can assist or somehow reduce the amount of crop losses due to pest infestation that’s going to feed people.

Facilitator: There's obviously a much bigger picture here, but tell me specifically more about your research.

Graham Nicholson: Essentially the research is based around the idea that a number of different organisms prey upon insects and have very toxic components within their venoms to paralyse their prey or actually kill the prey. So what we're doing is to take the venom, milk these organisms for their venom, and separate out the various components and look for those individual proteins and peptides that are highly toxic to insects but are not toxic to vertebrates - humans, mammals, etcetera. Taking these insect-selective toxins, we can then develop them as a variety of different insecticidal agents.

Over the past eight or 10 years we've actually found about five different groups of toxins, families of toxins, with multiple components within those families that are targeting quite unusual things within the insect nervous system. So things that are not normally thought of as being targets for conventional insecticides and some of those are now being taken up by biotech companies as ways of developing the new generation insecticides, which are biologically-friendly, environmentally-friendly and don’t affect humans.

Facilitator: What kind of animals and insects are you working with?

Graham Nicholson: We mainly work with funnel webs and there are about 40 or so different species of funnel webs here in Australia, so we've got a variety of different potential sources. We also work with tarantulas and there's hundreds of different types of tarantulas both here in Australia and overseas, so we've got a huge resource there. In fact, there's about 40,000-odd species of spiders in the world so it's a cornucopia of different compounds that we could potentially investigate.

Facilitator: Let's talk about how you do your research.

Graham Nicholson: With the majority of spiders you can actually aggravate them and they’ll actually release a certain amount of venom onto the ends of their fangs. You simply suck that venom off the ends of the fangs, so for a lot of spiders that’s fairly easy to do. Some species you’ve actually got to stimulate them with an electrical current across their fangs and they will actually release it because the muscles contract in the venom glands. For other ones, basically you’ve got to dissect out the venom glands to extract it. That part of it's not so bad, the hard part is actually purifying individual components from within that venom.

You might be surprised to know that some of these spiders have over 2000 components within their venom. We're trying to determine how they actually produce their toxicity so we use a combination of electrophysiology and neuromuscular physiology type assays to work out what the actual target is, what they're actually doing to that target and how that actually produces the toxicity in the insect.

Facilitator: So what's the bigger picture here? Where's all this taking us?

Graham Nicholson: The big picture here is taking a natural product and developing it into something we can use. The problem we've got is pest resistance, we're running out of targets to develop new insecticides against, so let's go to nature, find something that is already existing in nature and develop it commercially. That’s going to overcome the food problem.

Facilitator: Well, Graham Nicholson, it sounds like your research is going to have some much wider implications. Thank you so much for chatting with us.

Graham Nicholson: Thank you.

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