Only about 10% of the world's roughly 4,000 snake species have venom strong enough to seriously hurt a human, but that's enough for snake bites to be an important public health concern. To help better understand how snakes make their venom and how venoms differ from one species to another, researchers developed a new way to zero in on the genes that snakes use in venom production. Their work was published in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources.

"We've developed a tool that can tell us which venom-producing genes are present across an entire snake family in one fell swoop," says Sara Ruane, the Assistant Curator of Herpetology in the Field Museum's Negaunee Integrative Research Center and the study's senior author. . . .

"It's important to know what's in a snake's venom, because different kinds of venom do different things— some venoms affect the nervous system, some affect the circulatory system, some affect cell function," says Ruane. "Knowing what's in a certain kind of venom can help in the development of antivenom for treating that kind of snakebite."

What's more, there are compounds in snake venoms that are actually used in pharmaceutical development and human medicine— for instance, the first ACE-inhibitor drug for treating high blood pressure was created from a compound found in the venom of a Brazilian pit viper.

"You can harness the power of death in a controlled way," says Ruane.

Since there are thousands of genes that produce venom and each snake's genome contains tens of thousands of genes, it can be difficult to zero in on the ones present for venom production in a given species. To solve this problem, Ruane and her colleagues, led by the study's first author, Scott Travers, developed a technique called VenomCap.

VenomCap is a set of exon-capturing probes, which are groups of molecules designed to interact with a specific group of genes. VenomCap was designed to bind with any of the several thousands of genes that previous studies have shown are involved with venom production in snakes.