Hemocyanins are large oligomeric copper-containing pro-teins that serve for the transport of oxygen in many arth-ropod species. While studied in detail in the Chelicerata and Crustacea, hemocyanins had long been considered unnec-essary in the Myriapoda. Here we report the complete molecular structure of the hemocyanin from the common house centipedeScutigera coleoptrata(Myriapoda: Chilo-poda), as deduced from 2D-gel electrophoresis, MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry, protein and cDNA sequencing, and homology modeling
