ConoServer, a database for conopeptides

ConoServer is a database specialized in the sequence and structures of conopeptides, which are peptides expressed by carnivorous marine cone snails. A fascinating feature of these peptides is their high specificity and affinity towards human ion channels, receptors and transporters of the nervous system. This makes conopeptides an interesting resource for the physiological studies of neuroreceptors and promising drug leads. Conopeptides are further describe here and a selection of recent reviews on the subject can be found here.

Classifications. Conopeptides are classified into disulfide rich (conotoxins) and several classes of disulfide poor peptides. The three classification schemes used in ConoServer, the gene superfamilies, the cysteine frameworks, and the pharmacological families are described and analyzed here.

Post-translational modifications. Conopeptide are heavily post-translationally modified and the list of modifications found naturally or introduced artificially is provided here.

Statistics. Statistics on the currently known conopeptides are provided here. The statistics include: the relationship between conopeptide classification schemes, the sequence consensus between signal peptides of each gene superfamily, the number of entries for each cone snail species, the characteristics of conopeptides for which a three-dimensional structure was determined, the number of patented sequences, and the journal the most cited in the ConoServer.

Number of Entries Species Coverage Links to UniProt, Genbank or PDB
Nucleotides 1914 71 1814
Proteins 4136 90 3772
Structures 145 29 145

ConoNews

  • 2011-12-09 Last update.
  • 2011-11-03 Updates to ConoServer are published in Nucleic Acids Research:
    Kaas,Q., Yu,R., Jin,A.H., Dutertre,S. and Craik,D.J. ConoServer: updated content, knowledge, and discovery tools in the conopeptide database. Nucleic Acids Res (2012).
  • 2011-09-01 The ConoMass web tool is available in the "Tools" menu. This new algorithm helps to identify conopeptides predicted from precursors in mass spectrometry data. ConoMass was implemented to complement the precursor annotation tools, now called ConoPrec, to build a discovery pipeline linking transcriptomics to proteomics.
  • 2011-07-30 the data from the database can now be downloaded in xml format (in tools/conoserver's data)