MBE Advance Access published November 7, 2013 The First Venomous Crustacean Revealed by Transcriptomics and Functional Morphology: Remipede Venom Glands Express a Unique Toxin Cocktail Dominated by Enzymes and a Neurotoxin Bjo¨rn M. von Reumont,*,1 Alexander Blanke,2 Sandy Richter,3 Fernando Alvarez,4 Christoph Bleidorn,3 and Ronald A. Jenner*,1 1Department of Life Sciences, The Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom 2Center of Molecular Biodiversity (ZMB), Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig, Bonn, Germany 3Molecular Evolution and Systematics of Animals, Institute for Biology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany 4Coleccio´nNacionaldeCrusta´ceos, Instituto de Biologia, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, Mexico *Corresponding author: E-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected]. Associate editor: Todd Oakley Sequence data and transcriptome sequence assembly have been deposited at GenBank (accession no. GAJM00000000, BioProject PRJNA203251). All alignments used for tree reconstructions of putative venom proteins are available at: http://www.reumont.net/ vReumont_etal2013_MBE_FirstVenomousCrustacean_TreeAlignments.zip. Downloaded from Abstract Animal venoms have evolved many times. Venomous species areespeciallycommoninthreeofthefourmaingroupsof arthropods (Chelicerata, Myriapoda, and Hexapoda), which together represent tens of thousands of species of venomous http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/ spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and hymenopterans. Surprisingly, despite their great diversity of body plans, there is no unambiguous evidence that any crustacean is venomous. We provide the first conclusive evidence that the aquatic, blind, and cave-dwelling remipede crustaceans are venomous and that venoms evolved in all four major arthropod groups. We produced a three-dimensional reconstruction of the venom delivery apparatus of the remipede Speleonectes tulumensis, showing that remipedes can inject venom in a controlled manner.