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Abstract Many marine organisms usually secrete chemical compounds and toxins,which posses antitumor, antiviral, antibacterial, antinflammatoryactivities. The toxins are therefore candidates for drugs. Scratcher is a kind of venom secreted by cone snail. Thebiochemical property of scratcher is still uncertain, but the amino acidsequence and the symptoms of scratch toxicity in animal test are known.Scratcher is a small peptide, composed of 29 amino acid residues, andcontains 4 cysteines, forming two disulfide bonds. Scratcher also containsa carboxyglutamic acid and amidation at C-terminal, which are rare post-translational modifications. We synthesized and purified scratcher and checked the molecularweight by Mass spectroscopy. After oxidation reactions, we found onemajor product which may be some disulfide bond patterns ([12-27;16-25]or [12-25;16-27]). Our CD data indicated that the structure of scratcher iscomposed of 30% helicity. We also determined the solution structure of scratcher in water, using a combination of NMR data and distancegeometry calculation. The NMR data corroborates our CD data: we observed a characteristic a-helical conformation in the sequence region ofPhe7-Ile20.
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