Snail Insulin.

INSULIN; CONOTOXINS; CONUS; CELL receptors; CHEMICAL biology; INSULIN receptors

When Safavi-Hemami showed the new snail insulin to her collaborator Danny Hung-Chieh Chou of Stanford University, "he said, 'It's been done,'" Safavi-Hemami recalls, "but when we looked, the biology was so different." The human insulin molecule's clumping region is also crucial for binding to cells' receptors, and this region is truncated in the geographer cone snail's insulin. Different cone snail species have distinct venom cocktails, likely including unique insulin types and other valuable molecules. [Extracted from the article]

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