Horseshoe crabs (Xiphosura) are traditionally regarded as sister group to the clade of
terrestrial chelicerates (Arachnida). This hypothesis has been challenged by recent …

Comprising of over a million described species of highly diverse invertebrates, Arthropoda is
amongst the most successful animal lineages to have colonized aerial, terrestrial, and …

Long-branch attraction is a systematic artifact that results in erroneous groupings of fast-
evolving taxa. The combination of short, deep internodes in tandem with long-branch …

Chelicerata constitutes an ancient, biodiverse, and ecologically significant group of
Arthropoda. The study of chelicerate evolution has undergone a renaissance in the past …

Pseudoscorpiones, with nearly 3700 described species, are an ancient and globally
distributed group of arachnids with a fossil record dating back to the Middle Devonian …

The miniaturized arachnid order Palpigradi has ambiguous phylogenetic affinities owing to
its odd combination of plesiomorphic and derived morphological traits. This lineage has …

Linear cationic venom peptides are antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) that exert their effects by
damaging cell membranes. These peptides can be highly specific, and for some, a …

Most knowledge of spider venom concerns neurotoxins acting on ion channels, whereas
proteins and their significance for the envenomation process are neglected. The here …

Animal venoms are promising sources of novel drug leads, but their translational potential is
hampered by the low success rate of earlier biodiscovery programs, in part reflecting the …

Difficult drug targets are becoming the normal course of business in drug discovery,
sometimes due to large interacting surfaces or only small differences in selectivity regions …