Polyamine toxins from spiders and wasps

This chapter summarizes all of the naturally occurring polyamine toxins from spider and wasp sources. It discusses the basic problems of their isolation, structure elucidation, and synthesis. It also describes polyamine toxin analogs. Plausible structural variations of the original natural products are outlined and synthetic approaches to the respective artificial target molecules briefly explained. The venoms of spiders and wasps are complex composites of free amino acids, large proteinaceous toxin, and relatively small polyamine toxins. For a long time, the interest in such venoms primarily focused on the high molecular weight components, particularly those extracted from tropical spiders. With the development of improved analytical methodologies and because of the interesting neurotoxic activities of these compounds, the polyamine venom components of common “garden variety” spiders, as well as wasps have gained attention. Several laboratories have concentrated their research on the isolation, structure elucidation, synthesis, and pharmacology of such natural products, as well as the study of synthetic analogs