I missed this recent study and it's ridiculously cool!
"...From an ecological-evolutionary perspective, a post-transcriptional mechanism that modulates rapid variation of the venom phenotype can potentially confer adaptive advantages in response to environmental changes...."
...right??? because of course it would. 'Cause if you're a snake and you want to spread across a mountainous region where some of your 94th cousins live close to the ocean and you live at 3,000 meters you and your cousins have different things that you need to need to defend your self from, or prepare for lunch, right?
And is the fastest way to do that adaptation waiting 140,000 years and 220,0000 generations for your DNA to make those changes? Or could post-transciptional mechanisms lead you to make a toxin that can KILL THE MOUNTAIN THINGS IN YOUR WAY?
Sounds to me like one of those things is more energetically favorable than the others.
This group does some awesome stuff - first looking at the intact protein profiles of the snake venoms they got from different elevations - and they look different by eye, for sure. They also....have different lethalities on different animals...which.... yo, you wouldn't know until you checked, right?
Bottom up proteomics is done with SDS-PAGE, in-gel digestion and analysis on a Q Exactive Plus.
All the data is up on MASSIVE accessioned as MSV000096598 if you want to take a look at it.
I tell you what, I get to do a lot of cool stuff in a medical school with some sky bridges to where the operating rooms and MDs are, but I'll never get tired of looking at someone using the same tools we have to do things like question basic evolutionary paradigms with weird stuff like poisons they squeezed out of a snake. Okay, I do get bored when people have the same tools but do a half-assed job and get away with it because they completely invaluable samples, but that's not what you'll find here.
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