**5. Concluding remarks**

Animal venoms are true "cocktails" of substances normally harmful, but that can be ex‐ plored with intelligence for medical use. Many authors even use the word "cornucopia" to define a venom. The cornucopia — junction of the Latin "*cornu*" (horn) with "*copiae*" (strength) -, also called "horn of plenty", is a symbol of nourishment and abundance in clas‐ sical mythology, usually represented by a large horn-shaped container overflowing with products such as flowers, dried fruit, other foodstuffs, and other types of wealthiness. Nowadays it is particularly associated with the Thanksgiving holiday. In toxinology, cornu‐ copia represents the chemical wealth of animal venoms, where one can find thousands of such substances with interesting biological effects that can be explored as candidates for fu‐ ture pharmaceutical products.

Much (perhaps the largest) of this pool of substances is of peptidic nature, i.e., polypeptides with molecular weight below 10 kDa. These are biologically active peptides with diverse functions, ranging from heart hypotensors to erectile dysfunction controllers. Thus, the pep‐ tidomic analysis of animal venoms is an emerging and promising area of science, and can be considered a frontier area as it includes researchers from toxinology, proteomics, pharma‐ cology, therapeutics, drug discovery, peptide chemistry, analytical chemistry, etc.

In this chapter we tried to show the importance of animal venoms for molecular toxinology and its potential use for biomedical applications. We also sought to demonstrate the recent advent and rapid growth of peptidomic analysis as the main tool to explore the molecular features of these venoms, not only to produce more efficient antisera against venomous bites but also and mainly to characterize the components of peptide nature in search for new products of pharmacological interest. Although this new science is still in its early stages of development, it is already very mature. This is a science field that has enough potential to grow and provide creative solutions to problems that affect human health. Hopefully more and more researchers become interested on this topic. Medicine has much to gain from it.
