Department of Biology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Gigascience. 2022 Dec 28;12. doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giad002. Epub 2023 Feb 10.
The orb web is a remarkable example of animal architecture that is observed in families of spiders that diverged over 200 million years ago. While several genomes exist for araneid orb-weavers, none exist for other orb-weaving families, hampering efforts to investigate the genetic basis of this complex behavior. Here we present a chromosome-level genome assembly for the cribellate orb-weaving spider Uloborus diversus. The assembly reinforces evidence of an ancient arachnid genome duplication and identifies complete open reading frames for every class of spidroin gene, which encode the proteins that are the key structural components of spider silks. We identified the 2 X chromosomes for U. diversus and identify candidate sex-determining loci. This chromosome-level assembly will be a valuable resource for evolutionary research into the origins of orb-weaving, spidroin evolution, chromosomal rearrangement, and chromosomal sex determination in spiders.
球蛛型蛛网是一种十分独特的动物建筑结构，在 2 亿多年前就已经分化出了具有该结构的蜘蛛科。尽管已经存在几种圆蛛基因组，但其他球蛛型蛛网的蜘蛛科却没有，这阻碍了对这种复杂行为的遗传基础的研究。在这里，我们为具纺器球蛛 Uloborus diversus 提供了一个染色体水平的基因组组装。该组装证实了古老的蛛形纲基因组加倍，并鉴定出了每一类蛛丝蛋白基因的完整开放阅读框，这些基因编码了蛛丝的关键结构组成部分。我们鉴定出了 U. diversus 的 2 条 X 染色体，并鉴定出了候选性别决定基因座。该染色体水平的组装将成为球蛛型蛛网起源、蛛丝蛋白进化、染色体重排和蜘蛛染色体性别决定进化研究的宝贵资源。
