BACKGROUND: Venomous animals incapacitate their prey using complex venoms that 
can contain hundreds of unique protein toxins. The realisation that many of 
these toxins may have pharmaceutical and insecticidal potential due to their 
remarkable potency and selectivity against target receptors has led to an 
explosion in the number of new toxins being discovered and characterised. From 
an evolutionary perspective, spiders are the most successful venomous animals 
and they maintain by far the largest pool of toxic peptides. However, at 
present, there are no databases dedicated to spider toxins and hence it is 
difficult to realise their full potential as drugs, insecticides, and 
pharmacological probes.
DESCRIPTION: We have developed ArachnoServer, a manually curated database that 
provides detailed information about proteinaceous toxins from spiders. Key 
features of ArachnoServer include a new molecular target ontology designed 
especially for venom toxins, the most up-to-date taxonomic information 
available, and a powerful advanced search interface. Toxin information can be 
browsed through dynamic trees, and each toxin has a dedicated page summarising 
all available information about its sequence, structure, and biological 
activity. ArachnoServer currently manages 567 protein sequences, 334 nucleic 
acid sequences, and 51 protein structures.
CONCLUSION: ArachnoServer provides a single source of high-quality information 
about proteinaceous spider toxins that will be an invaluable resource for 
pharmacologists, neuroscientists, toxinologists, medicinal chemists, ion channel 
scientists, clinicians, and structural biologists. ArachnoServer is available 
online at http://www.arachnoserver.org.