Abstract

Many present-day drugs are derived from compounds that are natural products, a traditional source of which is fermentation broths of microorganisms. The venoms of cone snails are a new natural resource of peptides that may have a pharmaceutical potential equivalent to those from traditional sources, particularly for developing drugs that target cell-surface receptors or ion channels. In effect, cone snails have used a combinatorial library strategy to evolve their small, highly bioactive venom peptides. The methods by which the snails have generated thousands of peptides with remarkable specificity and high affinity for their targets may provide important lessons in designing combinatorial libraries for drug development.

Keywords

VenomDrug discoveryConusBiologyDrug developmentDrugPeptideComputational biologyBiotechnologyBiochemistryPharmacologyEcology

MeSH Terms

Amino Acid SequenceAnimalsDrug DesignMolecular Sequence DataMollusk VenomsSnails

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Publication Info

Year
1995
Type
review
Volume
13
Issue
10
Pages
422-426
Citations
100
Access
Closed

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Cite This

Baldomero M. Olivera, David R. Hillyard, Maren Marsh et al. (1995). Combinatorial peptide libraries in drug design: lessons from venomous cone snails. Trends in biotechnology , 13 (10) , 422-426. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-7799(00)88996-9

Identifiers

DOI
10.1016/s0167-7799(00)88996-9
PMID
7546566

Data Quality

Data completeness: 81%