Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
IBMM, Université Montpellier, CNRS, ENSCM, 34095 Montpellier, France.
Toxins (Basel). 2022 Mar 19;14(3):226. doi: 10.3390/toxins14030226.
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 venom gland lacked distinct compartmentalisation. Transcriptomics revealed 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 to , the earliest diverging species from which a defence-evoked venom has been obtained, and fish-hunting from the 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.
防御性地使用芋螺毒液的功能最初可能是在祖先级的食虫蜗牛中出现的，后来在分隔的毒液管中重新利用，以促进向食软体动物和食鱼类的饮食转变。与它在基础谱系中的位置一致，我们证明毒液腺缺乏明显的分隔。转录组学揭示了表达了广泛的结构类别，其中包含抑制性半胱氨酸结（ICK）的肽类占主导地位。为了更好地了解毒液腺分隔的进化，我们将与进行比较，是最早分化的物种，从中获得了防御性诱导的毒液，以及来自注入不同防御性和捕食性毒液的亚属的鱼类捕食者。这些比较支持了这样的假设，即毒液腺的分隔是在食虫性物种中出现的，并使毒液肽重新利用，以促进在更近分化的芋螺谱系中从食虫到食软体动物和食鱼类的饮食转变。
