. Since its establishment in the first grant period, the Venom Resource Core has expanded to a collection of over 100 Conus species, and the facility has developed to a highly efficient operation for identification of specific venom components. Collection of Conus specimens from several countries will continue, but most of them will be obtained from various localities of the Philippines, the richest source of Conus species; about 200 of the 500 known species are found in the Philippines. In most cases, venom is processed in the Marine Science Institute of the University of the Philippines and transported to the University of Utah where a system for rapid assay, fractionation and purification has been developed; the collection of whole venom ducts and tissues (particularly hepatopancreas) has been greatly expanded. The latter are the starting point for molecular analyses. The Core will concentrate on two types of collection activities: (1) Increasing the amount of venom for new classes of fish-hunting species such as Conus bocki, C. bullatus, C. kinoshitai, C. parius, C. flavus, C. strioIatus, C. achatinus, C. spectrum and C. cinereus. (2) Obtaining tissues or preserved specimens of the remaining fish-hunting Conus species, including some that are either very rare of that come from inaccessible localities. Among these are Conus cervus, C. dusaveli, C. proximus, C. moIucensis, C. collisus and C. subulatus. Purified natural Conus peptides, synthetic peptides, derivatives and analogs will also be maintained by the core facility. The collection of venom ducts and other tissues from selected Conus species will be used for preparation of cDNA libraries which will be needed to rapidly expand conotoxin sequence databases through cDNA cloning. Furthermore, many thousands of venom ducts will be collected as part of our increasing efforts in the enzymology of post-translational modification.
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