Antimicrobials from Venomous Animals: An Overview

Abstract

The inappropriate or excessive use of antimicrobial agents caused an emerging public health problem due to the resulting resistance developed by microbes. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop effective antimicrobial strategies relying on natural agents with different mechanisms of action. Nature has been known to offer many bioactive compounds, in the form of animal venoms, algae, and plant extracts that were used for decades in traditional medicine. Animal venoms and secretions have been deeply studied for their wealth in pharmaceutically promising molecules. As such, they were reported to exhibit many biological activities of interest, such as antibacterial, antiviral, anticancer, and anti-inflammatory activities. In this review, we summarize recent findings on the antimicrobial activities of crude animal venoms/secretions, and describe the peptides that are responsible of these activities.

Cell-Penetrating Peptides Derived from Animal Venoms and Toxins

“…Interestingly, most structural and physicochemical features of CPPs can be observed in members of another class of bioactive peptides, termed antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are ubiquitously found in cells, tissues and biological fluids of organisms from diverse kingdoms, including venoms of poisonous animals [ 37 ]. Indeed, based on their structural characteristics, AMPs are membrane-active peptides that possess the ability to disrupt the plasma membrane integrity of their respective cellular targets as their principal mechanism of action, and penetrate target cells through pores [ 38 , 39 ].…”

Antibacterial Activity and Mechanism of Action of the Wasp Vespa Orientalis Venom Peptides

“…To address the rapid emergence of resistance to the classical antibiotics, naturally occurring antibacterial agents are promising candidates in the search for novel therapeutic agents [22,23] . Antibacterial property has been reported for the venoms of a wide variety of animals including venoms of snakes, scorpions, spiders, and wasps; all of which are predatory or parasitic animals [24] .…”

Combined Proteotranscriptomic-Based Strategy to Discover Novel Antimicrobial Peptides from Cone Snails

“…Although conotoxins have a wide array of unique structures, the most common use of conotoxins is focused on pain management [ 63 ]. However, some conotoxins have proved to be highly effective against pathogens with little resistance due to their membrane-disruptive mechanisms [ 64 ]. The antimicrobial effects of conotoxins are seldomly documented and remain underexplored.…”