Supporting material for "High throughput identification of novel conotoxins from the Chinese tubular cone snail (Conus betulinus) by multi-transcriptome sequencing".

The venom of predatory marine cone snails mainly contains a diverse array of unique bioactive peptides commonly referred to as conopeptides or conotoxins. These peptides have proven to be valuable pharmacological probes and potential drugs because of their high specificity and affinity to important ion channels, receptors and transporters of the nervous system. Most of previous studies have specifically focused on the conopeptides from piscivorous and molluscivorous cone snails, but little attention has been devoted to the dominant vermivorous species.
The vermivorous Chinese tubular cone snail, Conus betulinus, is the dominant Conus species inhabiting in the South China Sea. The transcriptomes of venom ducts and venom bulbs from six specimens of this species were sequenced using both next-generation sequencing and traditional Sanger sequencing technologies, resulting in the identification of a total of 215 distinct conopetides. Among these, 183 were novel conopeptides, including 9 new superfamilies. It appears that most of the identified conopeptides were synthesized in the venom duct, while a handful of conopeptides were identified only in the venom bulb at very low levels.
A variance in conopeptides from different specimens of C. betulinus was observed, which suggested presence of intraspecific variability in toxicity at the genetic level.
The raw sequence data are available from the Sequence Read Archives, and here we provide the BLAST resutls and our annotations of this potentially fertile resource for the development of new pharmaceutics.