Mamba Juice: Expression of Exogenous Mambalgin Peptide Using the pGAPZα Vector System

Introduction: Pharmaceutical companies have invested considerable financial resources in developing analgesics. Often, the compounds used in these medicines are naturally occurring, such as aspirin and opioids. Mambalgin-1, an analgesic peptide component of the African Black Mamba venom, has been shown to have comparable analgesic effects to morphine but does not induce the debilitating withdrawal affects. Extracting this peptide is expensive and dangerous work; our objective was the development of a recombinant system producing this peptide without milking snakes.