Dear Colleagues,

A basic issue for animals is how to win-out survival competitions by balancing trade-offs and trait modifications necessary for predation and those intended for defence. Venomous animals can use toxins to mediate both key processes, thus shifts between being the hunter towards being the hunted and vice versa, might be expected to alter venom composition. Our understanding of the dual-purpose nature of toxin chemistry has significantly expanded over recent years because of improvements in modern instrumentation that supports large-scale measurement of venom proteomes. In this Special Issue, manuscripts that describe proteomics approaches offering critical insights into the following themes are especially welcome:

• Comparative study of toxins in poorly studied venomous animals.
• Adaptiveplasticity in venom composition related to animal behaviour or ecology.
• Integrating de novo peptide sequencing with annotation methods to assign the sequence to tandem mass spectra that are routinely discarded.
• Informatics methods to extract biological value from sequences by linkage to multiple biological, chemical and literature resources.
• Pharmaceutical discovery of novel therapeutic peptides.

Prof. Dr. Paul Long
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Toxins is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Gel electrophoresis
• mass spectrometry (MS, MS/MS, LC-MS
• proteome database
• protein quantitation
• orthology prediction
• functional annotation
• sequence analysis