Testing the Toxicofera: comparative transcriptomics casts doubt on the single, early evolution of the reptile venom system.

TL;DR: In this article, three lineages of cobras have independently evolved the ability to spit venom at adversaries, and the three spitting lineages possess venoms characterized by an up-regulation of phospholipase A2 (PLA2) toxins, which potentiate the action of preexisting venom cytotoxins to activate mammalian sensory neurons and cause enhanced pain.

TL;DR: This work provides insights into the evolution of these toxin classes, but because only a small number of species have been explored, generalizations are still rather limited.

TL;DR: The results demonstrate that the evolution and production of venom in snakes is a complex process that can only be understood in the context of comparative data from other snake tissues, including the identification of genes paralogous to venom toxins.

TL;DR: Comparative proteomic analysis of venoms of neonate and adult Prairie Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis viridis) from a discrete population in Colorado revealed a novel pattern of ontogenetic shifts in toxin composition for viperid snakes, relevant for antivenom efficacy and treatment of snakebite.

TL;DR: It is shown that accurate gene-level abundance estimates are best obtained with large numbers of short single-end reads, and estimates of the relative frequencies of isoforms within single genes may be improved through the use of paired- end reads, depending on the number of possible splice forms for each gene.

TL;DR: The Trinity method for de novo assembly of full-length transcripts and evaluate it on samples from fission yeast, mouse and whitefly, whose reference genome is not yet available, providing a unified solution for transcriptome reconstruction in any sample.

TL;DR: Although duplicate genes may only rarely evolve new functions, the stochastic silencing of such genes may play a significant role in the passive origin of new species.

TL;DR: This work presents several examples of exaptation, indicating where a failure to concep- tualize such an idea limited the range of hypotheses previously available, and proposes a terminological solution to the problem of preadaptation.