GBE Transcriptomic Profiling Reveals Extraordinary Diversity of Venom Peptides in Unexplored Predatory Gastropods of the Genus Clavus Aiping Lu 1,MarenWatkins2,QingLi3,4, Samuel D. Robinson2,GiselaP.Concepcion5, Mark Yandell3,6, Zhiping Weng1,7, Baldomero M. Olivera2, Helena Safavi-Hemami8,9, and Alexander E. Fedosov 10,* 1Department of Central Laboratory, Shanghai Tenth People’s Hospital of Tongji University, School of Life Sciences and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China 2Department of Biology, University of Utah 3Eccles Institute of Human Genetics, University of Utah 4High-Throughput Genomics and Bioinformatic Analysis Shared Resource, Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah 5Marine Science Institute, University of the Philippines-Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines 6Utah Center for Genetic Discovery, University of Utah 7Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology, University of Massachusetts Medical School 8Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah 9Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark 10A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia *Corresponding author: E-mail:
[email protected]. Accepted: April 20, 2020 Data deposition: Raw sequence data analyzed in this article have been deposited at NCBI under the accession PRJNA610292. Abstract Predatory gastropods of the superfamily Conoidea number over 12,000 living species. The evolutionary success of this lineage can be explained by the ability of conoideans to produce complex venoms for hunting, defense, and competitive interactions. Whereas venoms of cone snails (family Conidae) have become increasingly well studied, the venoms of most other conoidean lineages remain largely uncharacterized. In the present study, we present the venom gland transcriptomes of two species of the genus Clavus that belong to the family Drilliidae.