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It turns out that they’re this little Swiss Army knife of a model system that is really seeded with tons of pretty extreme adaptations and innovations like that. We sort of do all kinds of genomics on snakes as model systems, everything from understanding how they regenerate organs after they feed, which is a whole other line of work that the lab does, to studying venom and to using snakes as a model to understand how the process of speciation really works. I kept wondering just how they work, why they’re so different and that’s kind of led me to eventually going on and getting a PhD in biomolecular science and a postdoc at a med school in computational genomics. Snakes are unique and fascinating vertebrates, super different from any other vertebrates. My interest in that faded pretty quickly. (I’d) go around Latin America, collecting snakes and then sequencing genes. I started out working on them before I left college, working for The Nature Conservancy, went to graduate school to understand relationships of venomous snakes and how many species there were (and) things like that. Of all organisms around me growing up, snakes just stood out as really different and interesting and a little scary, to be honest. Todd Castoe: I’ve been fascinated with snakes since I was a kid. Castoe, why the world of snake venom? How did you get into this field? For an unabridged version - and more about snake venom - please listen to the audio file attached to this article.Īlexis Allison: Dr. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. In the latest installment of our occasional conversations with Fort Worth newsmakers, Todd Castoe, professor of biology at The University of Texas at Arlington, discusses how rattlesnake venom defies scientists’ previous understanding of why snake venoms are so variable, how evolution drives this variation, and what that means for treating snakebites.Ĭastoe is also the senior author on a related study that published July 18 in Nature Ecology and Evolution.