Untangling spider silk evolution with spidroin terminal domains.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Spidroins are a unique family of large, structural proteins that make up the bulk of spider silk fibers. Due to the highly variable nature of their repetitive sequences, spidroin evolutionary relationships have principally been determined from their non-repetitive carboxy (C)-terminal domains, though they offer limited character data. The few known spidroin amino (N)-terminal domains have been difficult to obtain, but potentially contain critical phylogenetic information for reconstructing the diversification of spider silks. Here we used silk gland expression data (ESTs) from highly divergent species to evaluate the functional significance and phylogenetic utility of spidroin N-terminal domains.

Results

We report 11 additional spidroin N-termini found by sequenci

SUBMITTER: Garb JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2928236 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature