Discovery and Characterization of Insecticidal Neurotoxins from Australian Funnel-web spider venom

The use of chemical insecticides is becoming increasingly complicated due to the evolution of resistance and increased community awareness of the environmental impacts of these pesticides. There is an urgent need for more sophisticated insect-control strategies. Transgenic plants and modified baculoviruses that express heterologous insecticidal toxins are recently developed biological pest-control techniques that may significantly reduce the load of chemical insecticides. However, the use of such techniques is currently limited because of the lack of well-characterized insecticidal toxins. It is in this context that we started this project