Similar snakes, different poisons

2008/09/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Eboluzioa
• Zoologia

Despite belonging to the same species, the poisons of the Bothops asper snake populations in the Costa Rican Caribbean and the Pacific are very different. A research carried out by a team of the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia analyzes the two populations and observes the differences. On the one hand, the poison of a population contains proteins that have no other (they have counted twenty-seven proteins of this type), and on the other, the proteins that appear in both groups do not have the same concentration in one and another population. This difference seems to be due to the fact that about five million years have been isolated.