Egg Case Silk Gene Sequences from Argiope Spiders: Evidence for Multiple Loci and a Loss of Function Between Paralogs.

ABSTRACT: Spiders swath their eggs with silk to protect developing embryos and hatchlings. Egg case silks, like other fibrous spider silks, are primarily composed of proteins called spidroins (spidroin = spider-fibroin). Silks, and thus spidroins, are important throughout the lives of spiders, yet the evolution of spidroin genes has been relatively understudied. Spidroin genes are notoriously difficult to sequence because they are typically very long (≥ 10 kb of coding sequence) and highly repetitive. Here, we investigate the evolution of spider silk genes through long-read sequencing of Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) clones. We demonstrate that the silver garden spider Argiope argentata has multiple egg case spidroin loci with a loss of function at one locus. We also use degenerate PC

SUBMITTER: Chaw RC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5765351 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature