The protein kinase inhibitor staurosporine inhibited, and often abolished, activity-dependent destaining of frog motor nerve terminals that had been preloaded with the fluorescent dye FM1-43. Staurosporine did not, however, block synaptic transmission; staurosporine treated muscles twitched in response to nerve stimulation, and the amplitudes of evoked end plate potentials were reduced only sli...

Black widow spider is endemic in the Mediterranean area and although envenomations are rare, may occasionally lead to death. We present a case of a 64-year-old female developing a rare variant of takotsubo, stress-induced, cardiomyopathy after a spider bite. This resulted in acute heart failure within 24  hours of the bite. With medical treatment and supportive care, the patient's clinical cond...

The eggs of black widow spider (L. tredecimguttatus) have been demonstrated to be rich in toxic proteinaceous components. The study on such active components is of theoretical and practical importance. In the present work, using a combination of multiple biochemical and biological strategies, we isolated and characterized the proteinaceous components from the aqueous extract of the black widow ...

Spider bites are uncommon medical events, since there are limited number of spiders world-wide with fangs strong enough to pierce human skin, and most spiders bite humans only as a final defense when being crushed between skin and another object. Thus, most lesions attributed to spider bites are caused by some other etiology. The spiders that can cause medically significant bites include widow ...

Modern spiders spin high-performance silk fibers with a broad range of biological functions, including locomotion, prey capture and protection of developing offspring. Spiders accomplish these tasks by spinning several distinct fiber types that have diverse mechanical properties. Such specialization of fiber types has occurred through the evolution of different silk-producing glands, which func...

Spider dragline (major ampullate) silk outperforms virtually all other natural and manmade materials in terms of tensile strength and toughness. For this reason, the mass-production of artificial spider silks through transgenic technologies has been a major goal of biomimetics research. Although all known arthropod silk proteins are extremely large (>200 kiloDaltons), recombinant spider silks h...