DOI: 10.5061/dryad.3n5tb2rdm
title: Comparative transcriptomics of the venoms of continental and insular radiations of West African cones

description: The transcriptomes of the venom glands of 13 closely related species of
 vermivorous cones endemic to West Africa from genera Africonus and
 Varioconus were sequenced and venom repertoires compared within a
 phylogenetic framework. The total number of conotoxin precursors per
 species varied between 108 and 221. Individuals of the same species shared
 about one fourth of the total conotoxin precursors. The number of common
 sequences was drastically reduced in the pairwise comparisons between
 closely related species and the phylogenetical signal was totally eroded
 at the genus level (no sequence was identified as shared-derived), due to
 the intrinsic high variability of these secreted peptides. A common set of
 four conotoxin precursor superfamilies (T, O1, O2, and M) was expanded in
 all studied cone species, and thus, they are considered the basic venom
 toolkit for hunting and defense in the West African vermivorous cone
 snails. Maximum likelihood ancestral character reconstructions inferred
 shared conotoxin precursors preferentially at internal nodes close to the
 tips of the phylogeny (between individuals and between closely related
 species) as well as in the common ancestor of Varioconus. Besides the
 common toolkit, the two genera showed significantly distinct catalogues of
 conotoxin precursors in terms of type of superfamilies present and the
 abundance of members per superfamily, but had similar relative expression
 levels indicating functional convergence. Differential expression
 comparisons between vermivorous and piscivorous cones highlighted the
 importance of the A and S superfamilies for fish hunting and defense.
description: Up to 16 individuals belonging to 14 species of cones snails from
 genera Africonus, Varioconus, and Kalloconus were sampled. The venom gland
 was dissected and preserve din RNAlater. RNA was extracted and sequenced
 using Illumina 2x100. The reads were cleaned and assembled using Trinity.
 Annotation was performed against a custom reference dataset. Raw reads are
 deposite in SRA database (accession numbers SRR11807492-SRR11807507,
 Bioproject PRJNA631880). Here, we provide the following files: 1)
 "Conus_mitogenomes_alignment.phy", which has the alignment used
 for reconstructing the phylogenetic tree in Supp. Mat. Fig. 1; 2)
 "CAP_protein_alignment. phy", which has the alignment used for
 reconstructing the phylogenetic tree in Supp. Mat. Fig. 3; 3)
 "Conotoxins_Hormones_Proteins_aa.fasta", a list of the amino
 acid sequences of all the identified venom precursors in fasta format; 4)
 "Conotoxins_Hormones_Proteins_nt.fasta", a list of the
 nucleotide sequences of all the identified venom precursors in fasta
 format; 5) "Trinity_assemblies. zip", the outputs of Trinity
 with the assemblies of all the venom gland transcriptomes studied in the
 paper; 6) "BLAST_db_conotoxins.fasta", the reference database
 used to indetify and annotate the venom precursors; 7)
 "PCA-Composition_comparisons.zip", the inputs and outputs of the
 principal components anlyses shown in Fig. 3, Supp Mat Figs. 5 and 6; 8)
 "RSEM_and_EBSeq.zip", the inputs and outputs of the differential
 expression studies shown in Fig. 4.
description: Species codes and abbreviations used in data files are summarized
 in the ReadMe.file