An in vitro assay to investigate venom neurotoxin activity on muscle-type nicotinic acetylcholine receptor activation and for the discovery of toxin-inhibitory molecules.

"Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

"We thank David Richards for early discussions on the assay concept, Ian Mellor (University of Nottingham, UK) for the gift of TE671 cells, and IONTAS (Cambridge, UK) for facilitating access to the monoclonal antibodies. We also thank Jory van Thiel for the creation of species distribution maps presented in Fig. 4, Paul Rowley and Edouard Crittenden (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK) for expert maintenance of venomous snakes and provision of venom samples, as well as use of photographs presented in Fig, 4, alongside those generously provided by Taline Kazandjian, Steven Hall, Simon Townsley, and Wolfgang Wüster. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust funded project grants 221710/Z/20/Z (CU, JK and NRC) and 221712/Z/20/Z (NRC and JK) and KU Leuven grant C32/16/035 (CU). MN is a recipient of a FWO postdoctoral fellowship 12X2722N. This research was funded in part by the Wellcome Trust. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. Rohit N. Patel: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Rachel H. Clare: Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing – review & editing. Line Ledsgaard: Resources, Writing – review & editing. Mieke Nys: Resources, Writing – review & editing. Jeroen Kool: Resources, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition. Andreas H. Laustsen: Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Chris Ulens: Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition. Nicholas R. Casewell: Conceptualization, Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition."