Structural classification of insecticidal proteins – towards an in silico characterization of novel toxins

The increasing rate of discovery of new toxins with potential for the control of invertebrate pests through next generation sequencing, presents challenges for the identification of the best candidates for further development. A consideration of structural similarities between the different toxins suggest that they may be functionally less diverse than their low sequence similarities might predict. This is encouraging from the prospective of being able to use computational tools to predict toxin targets from their sequences, however more structure/function data are still required to reliably inform such predictions.