Conotoxins

Many successful animal and plant families have developed distinctive biochemical strategies; one of the more unusual examples is found in a group of marine gastropods, the cone snails (Conus) (1). These animals have evolved a specialized biochemistry of small constrained peptides, the conotoxins. These peptides are the direct translation products of genes (2). However, because they are small enough for direct chemical synthesis and sufficiently constrained for three-dimensional conformation determination, conotoxins bridge protein chemistry and molecular genetics. Furthermore, the strategy that the cone snails have evolved over millions of years for the generation and design of an enormous array of small peptide ligands, each with high affinity and specificity for a particular receptor protein target, may be adaptable for use in vitro.