The cultures this website were maintained at 37 °C in a humidified atmosphere with 5% CO2. Prior to conducting the proliferation assays, B16-F10 cells (5 × 103 cells/well)

were plated in 96-well plates (TPP) and allowed to adhere and grow for 24 h under the same conditions as described above. Subsequently, the culture medium was removed and replaced with RPMI without serum to synchronize the cell cycle for an additional 24 h. Cells were then incubated with LiRecDT1 at concentrations of 10 and 25 μg/mL for 48 h in pentaplicate. The same experimental conditions were used in the control group, except that the medium contained an adequate amount of vehicle (PBS) rather than LiRecDT1. Additionally, an evaluation of the proliferation of B16-F10 cells following LiRecDT1 exposure was performed, but by using a concentration of 10 μg/mL, with a time of exposure of 24, Selleckchem Trichostatin A 48 or

72 h after the addition of phospholipase-D. Finally, proliferation assays were conducted with cells in the presence of synthetic sphingomyelin (5 and 10 mM) and LiRecDT1 at a concentration of 10 μg/mL for 48 h. After phospholipase-D incubation, measurement of cell proliferation was performed via the CyQUANT cell proliferation assay (Molecular Probes), as described by the manufacturer. This method is based on the use of a green fluorescent dye that exhibits fluorescence when bound to cellular nucleic acids. The resulting fluorescence was recorded on a Tecan Infinite M200 spectrofluorometer (Tecan) using an excitation wavelength of 480 nm and measuring emission at 520 nm. Statistics were performed using Selleck HA-1077 analysis of variance (ANOVA) and a post-hoc Tukey’s test for comparisons of means with the GraphPad InStat program, version 5.00 for Windows 7 and Vista. Statistical significance was set at *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01 and ***p < 0.001. Brown spiders (Loxosceles genus) are responsible for necrotic or gangrenous arachnidism. Their venoms are remarkable due to their inflammatory and dermonecrotic

activities, as previously reported, and data in the literature have indicated phospholipase-D toxins as being responsible for these deleterious effects ( da Silva et al., 2004, Kalapothakis et al., 2007). Fig. 1 shows the phospholipase-D profile of L. intermedia crude venom processed through two-dimensional electrophoresis, followed by immunoblotting using a polyclonal antibody raised against the recombinant toxin LiRecDT1 ( Chaim et al., 2006). The results indicated the existence of an intra-species family of antigenically and structurally related toxins (as indicated by the visualization of at least 25 spots), strengthening the hypothesized biological importance of this family of toxins in the biology of this spider and supporting transcriptome data showing that phospholipase-D mRNAs contribute approximately 20% of the total toxin-encoded transcripts in L. intermedia venom ( Gremski et al., 2010).