Venom is a remarkable evolutionary innovation that has underpinned the successful survival of several animal lineages, including arthropods. Scorpions are one such charismatic arthropod group equipped with a potent venom arsenal that facilitates their predatory lifestyle. Interestingly, despite the evolutionary history of over 400 million years, the extant scorpions exhibit unparalleled morphological similarities with their fossil counterparts. With its diverse topographic and climatic conditions, India harbours a vast diversity of scorpion fauna.

Scorpion venoms are a treasure trove of bioactive components with remarkable target specificities optimised by natural selection for millions of years. These components have tremendous potential as prospective leads for developing venom-derived therapeutics. Despite being fascinating from an evolutionary venomics and biodiscovery perspective, Indian scorpions remain largely unexplored. Scorpion research in India has primarily focused on taxonomic investigations enumerating and describing novel species without appropriate validation with molecular phylogenetics. The Indian red scorpion (Hottentotta tamulus) is a cryptic group of medically relevant scorpions with a pan-India distribution. Historically, several subspecies were proposed that have been synonymised during taxonomic revisions without any molecular validation. Anecdotally, it is known that H. tamulus stings from specific locales are more potent than others. But despite the evident differences in clinical manifestations, very few studies have characterised their venom repertoire. Furthermore, our understanding of the influence of life history, population genetics structures, ecology, and environment in shaping scorpion venoms is also limited. As part of my PhD research, using a multifaceted approach integrating phylogenetics, population genetics, proteomics, transcriptomics, in vitro and biochemical characterisations, I propose to exhaustively characterise the venoms of geographically disparate populations of H. tamulus, unravel the influence of ecology and evolution on their venom arsenal, and investigate the evolutionary relationships of these arthropods within a phylogenomic framework to bridge the current knowledge gap.