Phyla Molluska: The Venom Apparatus of Cone Snails

Dutertre, Sébastien; Griffin, John; Lewis, Richard J.

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-6419-4_8

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

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“…Some cone snail species, including the fish-hunting Conus geographus and the mollusc hunting Conus marmoreus, inject different venoms for defence and predation [ 7 ]. These distinct defensive and predatory venoms are injected using the same radula tooth envenomation apparatus but are differentially expressed from different sections of the venom duct [ 11 ]. Based on the venom duct analysis of C. geographus , defence-evoked venoms are typically expressed in the proximal section (near the venom bulb) and those used for predation in the distal section (near the proboscis) [ 7 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Venomics Reveals a Non-Compartmentalised Venom Gland in the Early Diverged Vermivorous Conus distans

Prashanth

Dutertre

Kumar

et al. 2022

Toxins

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The defensive use of cone snail venom is hypothesised to have first arisen in ancestral worm-hunting snails and later repurposed in a compartmentalised venom duct to facilitate the dietary shift to molluscivory and piscivory. Consistent with its placement in a basal lineage, we demonstrate that the C. distans venom gland lacked distinct compartmentalisation. Transcriptomics revealed C. distans expressed a wide range of structural classes, with inhibitory cysteine knot (ICK)-containing peptides dominating. To better understand the evolution of the venom gland compartmentalisation, we compared C. distans to C. planorbis, the earliest diverging species from which a defence-evoked venom has been obtained, and fish-hunting C. geographus from the Gastridium subgenus that injects distinct defensive and predatory venoms. These comparisons support the hypothesis that venom gland compartmentalisation arose in worm-hunting species and enabled repurposing of venom peptides to facilitate the dietary shift from vermivory to molluscivory and piscivory in more recently diverged cone snail lineages.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%