Blocking neurotransmission, botulinum neurotoxin is the most poisonous biological substance known to mankind. Despite its infamy as the scourge of the food industry, the neurotoxin is increasingly used as a pharmaceutical to treat an expanding range of muscle disorders. Whilst neurotoxin expression by the spore-forming bacterium Clostridium botulinum appears tightly regulated, to date only posi...

Cobra neurotoxin, a short-chain peptide isolated from snake venom of Naja naja atra, showed both a central analgesic effect and a hyperalgesic effect in mice tests. In order to explore mechanisms, a hypothesis is put forward that cobra neurotoxin takes effect through adenosine receptor pathway. The central effects of cobra neurotoxin were evaluated using the hot plate test (a model of acute pai...

Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) are highly potent poisons produced by seven serotypes of Clostridium botulinum. The mechanism of neurotoxin action is a multistep process which leads to the cleavage of one of three different SNARE proteins essential for synaptic vesicle fusion and transmission of the nerve signals to muscles: synaptobrevin, syntaxin, or SNAP-25. In order to understand the precise ...

BACKGROUND Botulinum neurotoxin type A (BoNT/A) is the active substance in preparations used for the highly effective treatment of neurologic disorders such as cervical dystonia, blepharospasm, or spasticity, as well as other indications such as axillary and palmar hyperhidrosis, and urologic disorders. OBJECTIVE To determine the amount of BoNT/A protein present in pharmaceutical preparations...

A postsynaptic neurotoxin was purified from Daboia russelli russelli venom using gel filtration, ion-exchange chromatography and reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography. The N-terminal sequence, molecular mass and pharmacological activities of the neurotoxin/cytotoxin indicate that it is a short-chain neurotoxin like that found in Elapid venom. This is the first report on the prese...

Painful Legs and Moving Toes syndrome (PLMT) is a rare neurological movement disorder characterized by involuntary irregular movements of one or more toes, often together, with moderate to severe diffuse pain at the foot leg. It can appear on both sides in upper limbs as well lower limbs. The etiology PLMT still unclear; therefore, main symptoms PLMT, including be treated only symptomatically, ...

Recent studies demonstrate that most cyanobacteria produce the neurotoxin beta-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) and that it can biomagnify in at least one terrestrial food chain. BMAA has been implicated as a significant environmental risk in the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). We examined several...

The crystal structure of the "long" alpha-neurotoxin alpha-cobratoxin was refined to an R-factor of 19.5% using 3271 x-ray data to 2.4-A resolution. The polypeptide chain forms three loops, I, II, III, knotted together by four disulfide bridges, with the most prominent, loop II, containing another disulfide close to its lower tip. Loop I is stabilized by one beta-turn and two beta-sheet hydroge...