Sharma Prashant P, Gavish-Regev Efrat
Department of Integrative Biology and Zoological Museum, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA; email:
The National Natural History Collections, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel; email:
Annu Rev Entomol. 2025 Jan;70(1):143-163. doi: 10.1146/annurev-ento-022024-011250. Epub 2024 Dec 19.
Chelicerata constitutes an ancient, biodiverse, and ecologically significant group of Arthropoda. The study of chelicerate evolution has undergone a renaissance in the past decade, resulting in major changes to our understanding of the higher-level phylogeny and internal relationships of living orders. Included among these conceptual advances are the discoveries of multiple whole-genome duplication events in a subset of chelicerate orders, such as horseshoe crabs, spiders, and scorpions. As a result, longstanding hypotheses and textbook scenarios of chelicerate evolution, such as the monophyly of Arachnida and a single colonization of land by the common ancestor of arachnids, have come into contention. The retention of ancient, duplicated genes across this lineage also offers fertile ground for investigating the role of gene duplication in chelicerate macroevolution. This new frontier of investigation is paralleled by the timely establishment of the first gene editing protocols for arachnid models, facilitating a new generation of experimental approaches.
螯肢动物门是节肢动物门中一个古老、生物多样性丰富且具有重要生态意义的类群。在过去十年中，螯肢动物进化的研究经历了复兴，这使得我们对现存目更高层次的系统发育和内部关系的理解发生了重大变化。这些概念上的进展包括在螯肢动物目的一个子集中发现了多个全基因组复制事件，如鲎、蜘蛛和蝎子。因此，长期以来关于螯肢动物进化的假说和教科书式的情景，如蛛形纲的单系性以及蛛形纲共同祖先对陆地的单次殖民，都受到了质疑。在这个谱系中保留古老的重复基因也为研究基因复制在螯肢动物宏观进化中的作用提供了肥沃的土壤。这一研究的新前沿与适时建立的首个蛛形纲动物模型的基因编辑方案相平行，推动了新一代实验方法的发展。
