Pr t Development of Immunodiagnosis and Improvement of Tmunotherapy of Snake Venom Poisoning Progress Report

ahis objective has been almost accomplished during the first six months of this project. The experiments and results can be briefly summarized as follows: 1.1 Molecular sizes and relative abundance of venom proteins of the six Thai poisonous snakes. With the use of polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) in the presence of sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS), proteins of each snake venom can be separated according to their sizes. These proteins are visualized by staining them with Coomassie blue. Since the amount of dye bound to the protein is roughly proportional to the protein content in each band, the intensity of the blue color reflects the relative abundance of the protein in the venom. The results of this study are representatively shown in Fig. 1. Among the elapids, Nn. 3,ip venom shows the highest abundancy of low W components, mostly postsynaptic neurotoxin of about 7,000­ 8,000 daltons. D,. fmcitW and Q,_hgaRkh_venoms give more high MW venom proteins while the contents of 7,000-8,000 daltons proteins are relatively less. This iin accordance with the lower lethality of these two venoms as compared to that of [ venom. One interesting observation as far as the viperid venoms are concerned is that they contain a lot of proteins of 1W less than 10,000. Since most, if not all, of the known toxic components of these venoms, as well as