Peñalver Enrique, Grimaldi David A, Delclòs Xavier
Department of Entomology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024, USA.
Science. 2006 Jun 23;312(5781):1761. doi: 10.1126/science.1126628.
The orb web is a spectacular evolutionary innovation that enables spiders to catch flying prey. This elegant, geometric structure is woven with silk fibers that are renowned for their superior mechanical properties. We used silk gland expression libraries to address a long-standing controversy concerning the evolution of the orb-web architecture. Contrary to the view that the orb-web design evolved multiple times, we found that the distribution and phylogeny of silk proteins support a single, ancient origin of the orb web at least 136 million years ago. Furthermore, we substantially expanded the repository of silk sequences that can be used for the synthesis of high-performance biomaterials.
圆网是一项惊人的进化创新，使蜘蛛能够捕捉飞行中的猎物。这种优雅的几何结构由丝纤维编织而成，这些丝纤维以其卓越的机械性能而闻名。我们利用丝腺表达文库来解决一个长期存在的关于圆网结构进化的争议。与圆网设计多次进化的观点相反，我们发现丝蛋白的分布和系统发育支持圆网至少在1.36亿年前有一个单一的古老起源。此外，我们大幅扩充了可用于合成高性能生物材料的丝序列库。
