1. Introduction
Far ahead of snakes and together with scorpions and spiders, cone snails are among the three most promising groups of venomous animals for pharmaceutical studies given the diversity of their toxins (King et al., 2008). Recent proteomic approaches reveal that each cone snail species may be able to produce at least 200 unique conotoxins or other proteins (Violette et al., 2012) and possibly even thousands if all variants and fragments are explored (Dutertre et al., 2013). Furthermore, as many as 761 species are now considered valid (www.marinespecies.org) and this number is expanding. This would lead to an estimate of at least 150,000 toxins, given that thousands of marine molluscs of the Conoidea superfamily remain to be investigated.