Specific anti-tumor activities in venom peptides of lesser paper wasp Parapolybia varia

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The lesser paper wasp, Parapolybia varia, belongs to large subfamily Polistinae and is distributed in Middle East, the Indo-Papuan region and East Asia. P. varia is known to become aggressive when disturbed for defending their colonies, resulting in fatal envenomation. Vespid chemotactic peptide (VCP) and vespakinin have recently been determined to be the top two genes most abundantly transcribed in venom glands of P. varia. To investigate the pharmacological and toxicological properties of VCP and vespakinin, their antitumor, antimicrobial, and cytotoxic activities were evaluated. VCP exhibited a significantly high antitumor activity against ovarian tumor cell SK-OV-3 at 100 M. VCP also showed higher hemolytic activity than vespakinin. Antimicrobial activity was only observed with VCP against yeast Candida albicans at 1 mM. Since VCP showed a relatively low hemolytic activity but a considerable level of antitumor activity, it has further merits to be exploited as a potential antitumor agent with reduced side effects on normal cells.