The venom resource core established in the first grant period will be expanded to provide a large collection of Conus venoms and to improve the facility to support a highly efficient operation for identification of specific venom components. Conus specimens will be collected from several countries, 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. The venom will be 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. By the end of the grant period, we anticipate that the venom core facility will have venoms or venom ducts of over 90 species of Conus. 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 in preparation for increasing our efforts in the enzymology of post-translational modification.
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