Multi-tissue transcriptomics of the black widow spider reveals expansions, co-options, and functional processes of the silk gland gene toolkit.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Spiders (Order Araneae) are essential predators in every terrestrial ecosystem largely because they have evolved potent arsenals of silk and venom. Spider silks are high performance materials made almost entirely of proteins, and thus represent an ideal system for investigating genome level evolution of novel protein functions. However, genomic level resources remain limited for spiders.

Results

We de novo assembled a transcriptome for the Western black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) from deeply sequenced cDNAs of three tissue types. Our multi-tissue assembly contained ~100,000 unique transcripts, of which > 27,000 were annotated by homology. Comparing transcript abundance among the different tissues, we identified 647 silk gland-specific transcripts, including the

SUBMITTER: Clarke TH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4200122 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature