Summary

Scorpion toxin-like domain

This family contains both neurotoxins and plant defensins. The mustard trypsin inhibitor, MTI-2, is plant defensin. It is a potent inhibitor of trypsin with no activity towards chymotrypsin. MTI-2 is toxic for Lepidopteran insects, but has low activity against aphids [1]. Brazzein is plant defensin-like protein. It is pH-stable, heat-stable and intensely sweet protein [2]. The scorpion toxin (a neurotoxin) binds to sodium channels and inhibits the activation mechanisms of the channels, thereby blocking neuronal transmission. Scorpion toxins bind to sodium channels and inhibit the activation mechanisms of the channels, thereby blocking neuronal transmission

Literature references

Ceci LR, Volpicella M, Rahbe Y, Gallerani R, Beekwilder J, Jongsma MA; , Plant J 2003;33:557-566.: Selection by phage display of a variant mustard trypsin inhibitor toxic against aphids. PUBMED:12581313
Assadi-Porter FM, Aceti DJ, Markley JL; , Arch Biochem Biophys 2000;376:259-265.: Sweetness determinant sites of brazzein, a small, heat-stable, sweet-tasting protein. PUBMED:10775411

InterPro entry IPR002061

Scorpion toxins, which may be mammal or insect specific, bind to sodium channels, inhibiting the inactivation of activated channels and blocking neuronal transmission. The complete covalent structure of the toxins has been deduced: it comprises around 66 amino acid residues and is cross- linked by 4 disulphide bridges PUBMED:2311768, PUBMED:6845379. An anti-epilepsy peptide isolated from scorpion venom PUBMED:2930463 shows similarity to both scorpion neurotoxins and anti-insect toxins.

This family also contains a group of proteinase inhibitors from Arabidopsis thaliana and Brassica spp., which belong to MEROPS inhibitor family I18, clan I-. The Brassica napus (Oil seed rape) and Sinapis alba (White mustard) inhibitors PUBMED:8143882, PUBMED:1451776, inhibit the catalytic activity of bovine beta-trypsin and bovine alpha-chymotrypsin, which belong to MEROPS peptidase family S1 () PUBMED:14705960.

Clan

This family is a member of clan Knottin_1 (CL0054), which contains the following 10 members:

Defensin_2 DUF2667 Gamma-thionin SCRL SLR1-BP Toxin_17 Toxin_2 Toxin_3 Toxin_37 Toxin_5

Gene Ontology

Cellular component	extracellular region (GO:0005576)
Molecular function	ion channel inhibitor activity (GO:0008200)

External database links

HOMSTRAD:	scorptoxin
PANDIT:	PF00537
SCOP:	2sn3
SYSTERS:	Toxin_3

Domain organisation

Below is a listing of the unique domain organisations or architectures in which this domain is found. More...

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Alignments

There are various ways to view or download the sequence alignments that we store. You can use a sequence viewer to look at either the seed or full alignment for the family, or you can look at a plain text version of the sequence in a variety of different formats. More...

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Alignment:	Seed (35) Full (346) NCBI (595) Metagenomics
Viewer:

Formatting options

Alignment:	Seed (35) Full (346)
Format:
Order:	Tree Alphabetical
Sequence:	Inserts lower case All upper case
Gaps:
Download/view:	Download View

Download options

Very large alignments can often cause problems for the formatting tool above. If you find that downloading or viewing a large alignment is problematic, you can also download a gzip-compressed, Stockholm-format file containing the seed or full alignment for this family.

You can also download a FASTA format file containing the full-length sequences for all sequences in the full alignment.

The main seed and full alignments are generated using sequences from the UniProt sequence database. However, we also generate alignments using sequences from the NCBI sequence database and the "metaseq" metagenomics dataset.

You can view alignments from these two additional datasets using the form above, or you can download alignments of NCBI or metagenomics sequences, as gzip-compressed files.

Pfam alignments:	Seed (35) Full (346) NCBI (595) Metagenomics
Full length sequences	Full-sequences (346)

External links

MyHits provides a collection of tools to handle multiple sequence alignments. For example, one can refine a seed alignment (sequence addition or removal, re-alignment or manual edition) and then search databases for remote homologs using HMMER2.

HMM logo

HMM logos is one way of visualising profile HMMs. Logos provide a quick overview of the properties of an HMM in a graphical form. You can see a more detailed description of HMM logos and find out how you can interpret them here. More...

Trees

This page displays the phylogenetic tree for this family. We use FastTree to calculate neighbour join trees with a local bootstrap based on 100 resamples (shown next to the tree nodes). FastTree calculates approximately-maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees from our seed or full alignments.

Note: You can also download the data files for the seed, full, NCBI or metagenomics trees.

Curation and family details

This section shows the detailed information about the Pfam family. You can see the definitions of many of the terms in this section in the glossary and a fuller explanation of the scoring system that we use in the scores section of the help pages.

Curation

Seed source:

Pfam-B_8170 (release 8.0)

Previous IDs:

toxin_3;

Type:

Domain

Author:

Bateman A, Moxon SJ, Finn RD

Number in seed:

35

Number in full:

346

Average length of the domain:

53.10 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

39 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

70.33 %

HMM information

HMM build commands:

build method: hmmbuild -o /dev/null HMM SEED

search method: hmmsearch -Z 9421015 -E 1000 HMM pfamseq

Model details:

Parameter	Sequence	Domain
Gathering cut-off	21.5	21.5
Trusted cut-off	21.5	21.5
Noise cut-off	20.9	21.4

Model length:

54

Family (HMM) version:

11

Download:

download the raw HMM for this family

Species distribution

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The tree shows the occurrence of this domain across different species. More...

Species trees

We show the species tree in one of two ways. For smaller trees we try to show an interactive representation, which allows you to select specific nodes in the tree and view them as an alignment or as a set of Pfam domain graphics.

Unfortunately we have found that there are problems viewing the interactive tree when the it becomes larger than a certain limit. Furthermore, we have found that Internet Explorer can become unresponsive when viewing some trees, regardless of their size. We therefore show a text representation of the species tree when the size is above a certain limit or if you are using Internet Explorer to view the site.

If you are using IE you can still load the interactive tree by clicking the "Generate interactive tree" button, but please be aware of the potential problems that the interactive species tree can cause.

Interactive tree

For all of the domain matches in a full alignment, we count the number that are found on all sequences in the alignment. This total is shown in the purple box.

We also count the number of unique sequences on which each domain is found, which is shown in green. Note that a domain may appear multiple times on the same sequence, leading to the difference between these two numbers.

Finally, we group sequences from the same organism according to the NCBI code that is assigned by UniProt, allowing us to count the number of distinct sequences on which the domain is found. This value is shown in the pink boxes.

We use the NCBI species tree to group organisms according to their taxonomy and this forms the structure of the displayed tree. Note that in some cases the trees are too large (have too many nodes) to allow us to build an interactive tree, but in most cases you can still view the tree in a plain text, non-interactive representation. Those species which are represented in the seed alignment for this domain are highlighted.

You can use the tree controls to manipulate how the interactive tree is displayed:

show/hide the summary boxes
highlight species that are represented in the seed alignment
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Interactions

There is 1 interaction for this family. More...

Toxin_3

Structures

For those sequences which have a structure in the Protein DataBank, we use the mapping between UniProt, PDB and Pfam coordinate systems from the PDBe group, to allow us to map Pfam domains onto UniProt sequences and three-dimensional protein structures. The table below shows the structures on which the Toxin_3 domain has been found.

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Family: Toxin_3 (PF00537)

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