👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little squiggle – NEP1. Now, frankly, nobody outside a very specific corner of molecular biology actually
knows
exactly what it is, and honestly? Neither do most of the people who yell about it in online entomology forums!
Basically, NEP1 stands for, according to current (and rather aggressively disputed!) thinking, the Necrosis-Enhancing Peptide 1 . Sounds terribly dramatic, right? And you'd be absolutely right. It’s a tiny, apparently utterly obnoxious peptide – essentially a little, viciously worded sequence of amino acids – found almost exclusively within the biting salivary secretions of the Shropshire snout tick, a beetle frankly so depressing to look at it probably hasn't seen the inside of an entomology museum in decades. Here's what we think: NEP1 doesn’t just cause a bit of a nip. Instead, upon initial attachment—specifically, when that snout tick first sinks its mandibles into its unfortunate victim (usually a woodlouse who has clearly overestimated his own vigilance)—the peptide initiates a rather spectacular and frankly alarming kind of localised necrosis – basically, it systematically dismantles the victim's immediate surroundings at a molecular level. It’s like a microscopic demolition derby, only instead of TNT you have… well, NEP1. Now, there are competing theories—some researchers suspect that the beetle is actually just really, really bad dressed in its saliva and we
