Spiders produce an extraordinarily complex venom for defense, prey capture, and competitor deterrence. However, very little is known about the genetic and transcriptional mechanisms used by spiders to generate such complex chemical cocktails. A combined proteomic, transcriptomic, and genomic approach was used to examine the range of peptides and proteins expressed in the venom of Australian funnel-web spiders, including the architecture of the toxin-encoding genes and the nature of the mRNA. This analysis revealed that the venom comprises more than 3000 peptides and proteins divided in 32 superfamilies. Genomic analyses showed that the peptide toxins are produced from intronless genes