Scientists have discovered proteins in the caterpillars' venom that fold up 'like a little donut' to punch holes in the victim's cells, delivering extremely potent pain signals to the brain.
Don't be fooled by the asp caterpillar's innocent look: Its fluffy coat conceals dagger-like spines with a painful venom that hospitalizes dozens of people in the U.S. every year.
"Anecdotally, the pain is very bad," study lead author Andrew Walker, a researcher at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience in Australia, told Live Science."The pain is long-lasting and said to be excruciating; people describe it as like touching coals or having suffered blunt force trauma, like being hit with a baseball bat."
"They form something like a little donut and punch a hole in the cell," Walker said."We think that when they punch holes in the cells, that turns [the cells] on to send these strong pain signals to the brain." "The structure of these pain-causing toxins is almost identical to toxins from bacteria," Walker said."We found that the gene encoding these toxins had been transferred from a bacterium to the ancestors of these caterpillars hundreds of millions of years ago, and then subsequently been recruited as a venom toxin."
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