Abstract
Marine Cone snails of the genus Conus contain complex peptide toxins in their venom. Living in tropical habitats, they usually use the powerful venom for self-defense and prey capture. Here, we study Conus crotchii venom duct using a peptide mass-matching approach. The C. crotchii was collected on the Cape Verde archipelago in the Boa Vista Island. The venom was analyzed using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS). About 488 molecular masses between 700 Da and 3000 Da were searched bymatching with known peptide sequences from UniProtKB protein sequence database. Through this method we were able to identify 12 conopeptides. For validation we considered the error between the experimental molecular mass (monoisotopic) and the calculated mass of less than 0.5 Da. All conopeptides detected belong to the A-, O1-, O2-, O3-, T- and D-superfamilies, which can block Ca2+ channels, inhibit K+ channels and act on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). Only a few of the detected peptides have a 100% UniProtKB database similarity, suggesting that several of them could be newly discovered marine drugs.
Highlights
Cone snails are venomous predators belonging to the Conidae family
Information (NCBI), UniProtKB, and Conoserver were used to match peptide masses predicted from sequences with a list of masses experimentally obtained in MASCOT search engine tool
All reduced and alkylated venom peptides from C. crotchii were analyzed by MS and amino acid sequence data were suggested by a MASCOT database search and blast analysis in UniProtKB
Summary
Cone snails (genus Conus) are venomous predators belonging to the Conidae family. There are. Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Dublin, Ireland) from C. magus has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat chronic pain in humans [10,11,12,13] Despite this achievement, the overall knowledge of Conus venom proteins and peptides is scarce compared to other animal venom-producers (e.g., snakes, scorpions, spiders and sea anemones), providing a huge potential for the discovery of new pharmacological drugs [14]. C. crotchii have a heavy shell, with a greenish ground color, normally with fine spiral dark brown lines It lives in shallow water (5 meters deep), and was observed only on south of Boa Vista island (Santa Mónica beach). The C. crotchii length is nearly 30 mm To our knowledge, this is the first description of conopeptides from the venom of a Cape Verde endemic Conus
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