Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Jul;338(5):314-322.
doi: 10.1002/jez.b.23119. Epub 2022 Jan 5.

Evidence of positive selection on six spider developmental genes

Pedro Mariano-Martins  1 , Raquel Dietsche Monfardini  1 , Nancy Lo-Man-Hung  1 , Tatiana Teixeira Torres  1
Affiliations

Evidence of positive selection on six spider developmental genes

Pedro Mariano-Martins et al. J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol. 2022 Jul.

Abstract

Spiders constitute more than 49,000 described species distributed all over the world, and all ecological environments. Their order, Araneae, is defined by a set of characteristics with no parallel among their arachnid counterparts (e.g., spinnerets, silk glands, chelicerae that inoculate venom, among others). Changes in developmental pathways often underlie the evolution of morphological synapomorphies, and as such spiders are a promising model to study the role of developmental genes in the origin of evolutionary novelties. With that in mind, we investigated changes in the evolutionary regime of a set of six developmental genes, using spiders as our model. The genes were mainly chosen for their roles in spinneret ontogeny, yet they are pleiotropic, and it is likely that the origins of other unique morphological phenotypes are also linked to changes in their sequences. Our results indicate no great differences in the selective pressures on those genes when comparing spiders to other arachnids, but a few site-specific positive selection evidence were found in the Araneae lineage. These findings lead us to new insights on spider evolution that are to be further tested.

Keywords: Araneae; appendages; development; molecular evolution; morphological novelty.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Abascal, F., Zardoya, R., & Telford, M. J. (2010). TranslatorX: Multiple alignment of nucleotide sequences guided by amino acid translations. Nucleic Acids Research, ​38. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkq291
    1. Abzhanov, A., & Kaufman, T. C. (2000). Crustacean (malacostracan) Hox genes and the evolution of the arthropod trunk. Development, 127, 2239-2249. https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.127.11.2239
    1. Abzhanov, A., Kuo, W. P., Hartmann, C., Grant, B. R., Grant, P. R., & Tabin, C. J. (2006). The calmodulin pathway and evolution of elongated beak morphology in Darwin's finches. Nature, 442, 563-567. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04843
    1. Abzhanov, A., Popadic, A., & Kaufman, T. C. (1999). Chelicerate Hox genes and the homology of arthropod segments. Evolution and development, 1(2), 77-89. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-142x.1999.99014.x
    1. Akam, M. E., & Martinez-Arias, A. (1985). The distribution of Ultrabithorax transcripts in Drosophila embryos. EMBO Journal, 4, 1689-1700. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1460-2075.1985.tb03838.x

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources