Introduction

Marine gastropods, better known as cone snails from Conus genus, produce a mixture of venomous peptides for capturing prey, defense and deterring competitors. These conopeptides can generally be divided into two broad classes, the disulfide rich conotoxins which contain two or more disulfide bonds and the disulfide poor which contain one or no disulfide bond. Conotoxins are small highly constrained peptides ranging from 10-40 amino acids in length. Each cone snail may contain up to 200 peptides and given there are over 700 cone snail species, the library of bioactive peptides is huge (with a broad estimate of thousands of unknown conopeptides [ref]). The targets for these toxins are a range of membrane bound receptors and ion channels, thus exhibiting great potential as therapeutics themselves or as leads to therapeutics.