Blog: Trials and tribulations in venom research

For BIAZA Vital Venoms and Practical Poisons week, we’re highlighting the work of individuals across the sector who contribute to advancing venomous species research and appreciation.

Phill Robinson, Senior Aquarist & Reptile & Invertebrate Keeper at The Deep, explains the trials and tribulations of undertaking a part-time research MSc whilst working full time and navigating a global pandemic.

As a kid I was always fascinated with animals, as part of this fascination came this stupid urge to seek out and antagonise wasp nests, which inevitably ended in being stung more times than I can remember… obviously! It was these interactions that first piqued my interest into venoms, although at the time it was more “why does it hurt so much when these things stab me.” Fast forward twenty-something years, I bagged myself a job at The Deep Aquarium in Hull, and over the years the interest in venom had turned into a much more science-y understanding of what toxins are about, although the learning not to get stung part was still to catch up. Several years into being at The Deep came the opportunity to do something that I had wanted to do for years; a masters degree! But not only that, it was an MSc researching venom, and to add to the excitement it was working in collaboration with Venomtech, a company in which I had been interested in for some time.

After some discussions about which direction to take the research, we decided that Cnidaria would be a good taxa to go with as it’s much more novel, we had access to a myriad of species, and marine toxins are lagging behind their terrestrial counterparts when it comes to our understanding of what they contain and their activity. I applied to do the MSc with Canterbury Christ Church University as the university is active in venom research, particularly when it comes to exploring the therapeutic, antibiotic, and anticancer properties of venom compounds.

The aim of my research, titled ‘Investigating Novel Non-Invasive Methods to Extract Cnidarian Toxins and their Potential use in Drug Discovery’, was initially to design and develop a completely new and non-invasive method to extract venom from multiple Cnidarian taxa whilst ensuring that they remain in situ, ensuring the device was also practical enough to be useful in the field. Aside from this we wanted to assess the activity of the toxins that we extracted, exploring their potential for the use against cancer cells.

The design and development of the device went surprisingly well, with the initial stages even generating enough data to publish our first paper from the project. Early testing showed some promise in the results we were getting as far as yielding proteins, my observations showed that it was completely non-invasive and the animals showed no distress,  and I even showed that the device was practical for use when diving. Everything seemed to be going well, with some promising initial results from PLA2 assays… and then Covid hit! With lockdowns, travel bans, and places closing left right and centre, carrying out any lab work became impossible, given the fact that I was living and working about 260 miles away from the labs I was meant to be using to study these venoms.

This is where I had to get creative, literally fabricating a make-shift lab in a spare room at home where I was able to work on (admittedly sub-par) protein purification, sample storage and preservation protocols, and cytotoxicity assays. Which all sounds fancy but in reality I was spending hours watching a tiny centrifuge spin around, lyophilising tubes of extract in food storage tubs with silica gel, and putting rehydrated ‘purified’ sample onto belly pork from the supermarket and incubating in a makeshift incubator, made from a poly box and a heat mat with a thermostat on.

Although all of this was usable data in the long run, it was a huge step away from the epic project that we had initially planned, so something else was needed. Queue the suggestion from Steve at Venomtech to have a look at reviewing the nomenclature of toxins, basically going through every known Cnidarian toxin and renaming it in a standardised format, which had been proposed several years earlier by Glenn King. This was a pretty major undertaking to add on to the project as I also had to teach myself Bioinformatics to an MSc level for some of it (thanks YouTube!) but I somehow managed to do it, reviewing hundreds of peptides, proteins, and enzymes and then proposing that a large portion of these venom compounds be renamed… although the paper for this is still in the works.

All in all, I passed and I finally graduated in September 2022, I still love all things toxin, I’m much less enthusiastic about wanting to jump straight onto a PhD than I was when I stared the MSc, and I definitely have a few grey hairs that I didn’t before I started!! 

Phill Robinson, Senior Aquarist and Venom Nerd, The Deep Aquarium, Hull.

Also by Phill – a summary of research on drug discovery from toxic animals

All blogs reflect the views of their author and are not a reflection of BIAZA's positions.