Effects of diet manipulation on conopeptide profiles in fish-eating conus striatus

Abstract

There are approximately 500 different species of cone snails (Conus). Each armed with a unique venom profile used to immobilize prey and to defend against predators. Conus toxins ("conopeptides") are comprised of small peptides approximately 10-30 amino acids in length. Individual conopeptides are capable of selectively targeting ligand-gated or voltage-gated ion channels, as well as specific isoforms of receptors. An interesting facet to conopeptides is their hypervariability in amino acid sequence. This is compounded by post-translational modifications which may play a determining role in how the conopeptides fold and hence their reactivity at K+, Na+, and Ca2+ ion channels and various protein receptors. Our research aims to investigate how the manipulation of diet will affect native Hawaiian Conus striatus venom profiles. This study will serve as a model system to explore the biochemical repertoire of the cone snails' venom profile. We believe that the current estimation of 100,000 conopeptides is an underestimation and we seek to broaden the present library. The cone snails will be fed capsules containing either fish food, with either human vitamin pack (w/w), a designated halide, or a combination of the two. Quantitative analysis of the resulting milked venom output will be undertaken by reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC).