Polyamine Toxins from Spiders and Wasps

Polyamine toxins, isolated from spider and wasp venoms, are a group of small molecular weight natural products with intriguing biological activities. They are secondary metabolites used for paralyzing prey, causing an immediate, but reversible, effect on the prey. Polyamine toxins have in particular been used as pharmacological tools for the study of ionotropic receptors, such as ionotropic glutamate (iGlu) receptors and nicotinic acetylcholine (nACh) receptors as nonselective open-channel blocker. Polyamine toxins have been used as templates to design novel molecular probes with improved properties over the naturally occurring compounds. In this chapter, we focus on the isolation and characterization of the polyamine toxins, as well as the recently developed synthetic strategies for the preparation of polyamine toxins and analogues. We also include the recent structure–activity relationship studies and application of polyamine toxins as biological tools, including developing selective iGlu subtype receptors and nACh receptors antagonists, as well as templates to develop labeled and fluorescent polyamine toxin probes.