2010, 28 (5): 511-515. Cone snails change “weapons” depending on whether they are hunting or defending themselves, University of Queensland The discovery provides insight into the evolution of venomous animals and could lead to new treatments for chronic pain in humans.UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) lead researcher Professor Richard Lewis said his team found cone snails could rapidly switch between distinct venoms depending on how they were stimulated.“Most venomous animals are thought to inject the same combination of venom toxins for both hunting prey and defending themselves from predators,” Professor Lewis said.“We found that the geography cone only injects this lethal venom when it feels threatened and acts in defence.“However, when hunting prey such as fish, they inject a less powerful and complex venom that isn’t toxic to humans, effectively switching weapons to match the situation.”The team made the discovery by encouraging geography cones to hunt and sting prey such as a fish in a low-level threat environment, and also by imitating a predator in a threatening environment to encourage it to release a defensive sting.In both cases, the researchers were able to collect the resulting venom for investigation.The venoms were then analysed using advanced mass spectrometry techniques, which revealed that the defensive and predatory venoms were quite distinct and were produced in different regions of the snail’s venom gland.Professor Lewis said it was the first time anyone had been able to prove a venomous animal used different venoms for hunting prey and defending themselves from predators.“It’s a remarkable adaptation that we found was widely evolved across fish and mollusc-hunting cone snails, and even ancient worm-hunting cone snails, but whether this finding extends to other venomous animals such as snakes and spiders remains to be seen,” Professor Lewis said.“In a practical sense, it provides a route to search for new venom toxins that act on human nerves and could be developed into treatments for chronic pain.“We can now start to investigate how these predatory and defensive venoms are produced and regulated, and use these findings to target those toxins with direct therapeutic potential.”Authorised by: Director, Office of Marketing and Communications Curr Pharm Des. For example, the venom duct possesses a complete complement of fatty acid metabolism pathways, suggesting it may use fatty acids as one of its main energy sources; going forward it will also be interesting to determine whether the absence of several vitamin and cofactor metabolism pathways is specific to venom duct, the whole animal, or merely an artifact of depth of coverage limitations in our RNA-seq datasets.Our finding that there exist gradients of conotoxin gene expression along the length of the venom duct is consistent with previous reports. Biochem Biophys Res Commun. “We found that the geography cone only injects this lethal venom when it … Annu Rev Biochem. The bright colors and patterns of cone snails are attractive, hence people sometimes pick up the live animals. There is no antivenin for a cone snail sting, and treatment is limited to merely keeping victims alive until the toxins wear off.Ironically, among the compounds found in cone snail venom are proteins which, when isolated, have enormous potential as pain-killing drugs. Biochemistry. G4.x is the commonly used nomenclature of alpha-A family of conotoxins identified from Below are the links to the authors’ original submitted files for images. 2003, 278 (5): 3137-3144. This allows us to combine non-overlapping contigs sharing the same best protein hit. © 2020 BioMed Central Ltd unless otherwise stated. 2008, 14 (24): 2462-2479. Their venom, a complex concoction of hundreds of different toxins, is delivered via a harpoonlike tooth propelled from an extendable proboscis. Genome Biol. Edited by: Lazarovici E, Spira ME, Zlotkin . The numbers of reads in each homologous-protein-group (HPG) were then calculated by summing the numbers of reads aligned to each contig in this group. 10.1172/JCI119438.Moriya Y, Itoh M, Okuda S, Yoshizawa AC, Kanehisa M: KAAS: an automatic genome annotation and pathway reconstruction server.

Gen Comp Endocrinol. 10.1186/1471-2105-11-601.Li H, Durbin R: Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler transform. Toxicon. Toxicon. It lives in reefs of the tropical Indo-Pacific, and hunts small fish. 10.1038/nrd1197.Olivera BM, Teichert RW: Diversity of the neurotoxic Conus peptides: a model for concerted pharmacological discovery. 1994, 63: 823-867. Among the 63 conotoxin transcripts listed in Additional file We also discovered that insulin-like growth factors are highly expressed in the distal (D) segment, comprising the most abundant non-toxin transcript in this segment. 1967, 4 (4): 275-284. J Mol Biol. [Not surprisingly, within the eight most highly ranked groups in Table The list of targeted pharmacological sites in Table Thus, the transcriptome data have rounded the picture of the most frequent transcripts of this particular piscivorous cone snail species. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btp324.Altschul SF, Gish W, Miller W, Myers EW, Lipman DJ: Basic local alignment search tool. A closer examination of these transcripts reveals that they contain IGF insulin-like domains and at least some of them contain signal peptides (according to SignalP [Analyses of the expression profiles of subclasses and individual conotoxins (Figure We have also generated a metabolic pathway map for the venom duct by combining the RNA-seq datasets for each duct segment. 10.1016/S0888-7543(03)00153-8.Parrizas M, Plisetskaya EM, Planas J, Gutierrez J: Abundant insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) receptor binding in fish skeletal muscle. Mol Biol Cell. Systema Naturae per Regna Tria Naturae, 10th ed., 1WoRMS (2010). 2011, 12: 60-10.1186/1471-2164-12-60.Petersen TN, Brunak S, von Heijne G, Nielsen H: SignalP 4.0: discriminating signal peptides from transmembrane regions.

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