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