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They’re beautiful, extremely poisonous, and objects of continuing fascination to the scientists that study them. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
“They’re more than an experiment. They’re life. Basically, we’re seeing mechanisms of life which we can’t study out in the environment. These snails are just absolutely amazing producers of a menagerie of compounds, which for myself to make in the test tube is absolutely impossible. Thesethese snails are basically libraries. They’re producing compounds all the time. They’re changing compounds. They’re making new compounds. “
Jon Paul Bingham is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Clarkson University. He’s talking about cone shells. They’re found mostly found in tropical waters and they use poisonous venom to immobilize their prey. The potency and complexity of the venom is part of what makes them fascinating to scientists.
“Cone shell venoms basically allow us to look at novel compounds with a potential pharmaceutical use or application. You can’t find any other animal which has such a complex mechanism, but we know so little about the complexity of this organism. We’ve focused on the isolation of drugs and compounds, but we know so little about their biology. We don’t know their mating cycles. We have very little information on their habitats and their environments. We have very little information on their growth and their age. We have no information on their metabolism or on their biochemistry. We don’t know how they make many of these novel chemical modifications that they undertake on their venoms. It’s something that we as scientists, we can learn from this act of nature that nature has provided us these key elements.”
We’ll hear more about cone shells in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation.
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