| Summary: | Conus ateralbus is a cone snail endemic to the west side of the island of Sal, in the Cabo Verde Archipelago off West Africa. We describe the isolation and characterization of the first bioactive peptide from the venom of this species. This 30AA venom peptide is named conotoxin AtVIA (δ-conotoxin-like). An excitatory activity was manifested by the peptide on a majority of mouse lumbar dorsal root ganglion neurons. An analog of AtVIA with conservative changes on three amino acid residues at the C-terminal region was synthesized and this analog produced an identical effect on the mouse neurons. AtVIA has homology with δ-conotoxins from other worm-hunters, which include conserved sequence elements that are shared with δ-conotoxins from fish-hunting Conus. In contrast, there is no comparable sequence similarity with δ-conotoxins from the venoms of molluscivorous Conus species. A rationale for the potential presence of δ-conotoxins, that are potent in vertebrate systems in two different lineages of worm-hunting cone snails, is discussed. This work was supported by grants to BMO from the National Institute of General Medical Science, GM 48677 and GM103362. Partial funding was obtained through a PhD grant to JLBN (SFRH/BD/51477/2011) from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the COMPETE—Operational Competitiveness Program and from national funds through FCT—Foundation for Science and Technology—under the project FCT Project UID/Multi/04423/ and by the project H2020 RISE project EMERTOX—Emergent Marine Toxins in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean: New Approaches to Assess their Occurrence and Future Scenarios in the Framework of Global Environmental Changes—Grant Agreement No. 778069. The sample collection in Cabo Verde was supported by Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
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