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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Synthesizing tarantula toxin for pain research
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:03
	Publish Date:		2016-08-10 19:00:00
	Description:		While tarantula venom contains many different toxins, recent research at the University of California, San Francisco has identified two that can activate pain-sensing neurons. To prove their effectiveness, researcher Jeremiah Osteen synthesized the toxins individually. "Having access to a synthetic toxin, you’re able to make it in very large quantities, whereas you would otherwise have to milk lots of spiders, and that’s both labor intensive and these spiders aren’t always easy to come by. So once you identify what you think is the toxin that’s causing your activity, you want to go and synthesize that and be able to show that you can recapitulate the activity without having to purify it directly from the venom." These two toxins can selectively manipulate pain fibers. One of them targeted nerve fibers not previously linked to any pain pathways. "How might these fibers be involved in different types of chronic pain disorders, and ultimately, can we tweak the chemistry of the toxin to be able to manipulate these fibers differently?"
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