INVESTIGADORES
RAMIREZ Martin Javier
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
The project “Assembling the tree of life: phylogeny of spiders”
Autor/es:
HORMIGA, G.; ARNEDO, M.; BOND, J.; CODDINGTON, J.; GOLOBOFF, P.; GRISMADO, C. J.; GRISWOLD, C.; HAYASHI, C.; HEDIN, M.; MADDISON, W.; MILLER, J.; PLATNICK, N. I.; PRENDINI, L.; RAMÍREZ, M. J.; SCHARFF, N.; SHEAR, W.; SIERWALD, P.; VINK, C.; WHEELER, W.
Lugar:
Gent, Bélgica
Reunión:
Congreso; 16th International Congress of Arachnology; 2004
Institución organizadora:
International Society of Arachnology
Resumen:
“Assembling the Tree of Life: Phylogeny of Spiders” is an ambitious five-year project whose main goal is to reconstruct the interfamilial relationships of the Order Araneae. A multidisciplinary team of 19 researchers in 14 institutions and five countries are involved in this research project which is funded bythe U.S. National Science Foundation. Phylogenetic relationships will be inferred from a charactermatrix of unprecedented dimensions: more than 20 million cells combining DNA sequence data withmorphological and behavioral characters scored for more than 525 spider genera plus 18 genera ofAmblypygi, Uropygi and Schizomida.We will sequence at least 50 "loci" (fragments of 500-1,000 or more base pairs that can be sequenced assingle pieces in both directions simultaneously) from the nuclear and mitochondrial genome. AlthoughDNA sequences have been proven to be extremely useful to resolve phylogenetic relationships amongspiders, the current knowledge on the spider genome is scarce and constrains available molecularmarkers to a handful of genes. We aim to improve this situation by generating a wealth of genomic datafor spiders. Central to this effort is the construction of cDNA libraries for targeted spider taxa andproduction of hundreds of ESTs (expressed sequences tags) from these libraries for discovering newgenes amenable to genomic PCR amplification. At the same time, we are using high-throughputsequencing techniques to obtain sequences for current standard markers in spider phylogenetics. Wehave already sequenced three nuclear and three mitochondrial markers for more than 100 speciesrepresenting 62 families and began designing new markers through ESTs from both silk-specific andnon-tissue specific cDNA libraries. More than sixty morphological character matrices have beenpublished for higher level systematics of spiders. These matrices include representatives of 102 spiderfamilies and some 23% of the genera. We are using a subset of these matrices, with more than 950hypotheses of homology, as our starting point for the collection of morphological data. The study ofmorphological features will make intensive use of scanning electron and optical microscopy to create anatlas of spider anatomy. A detailed description of this project can be found at its website(http://research.amnh.org/atol/files/). In this presentation we will introduce the main goals of the project and discuss the numerous challenges that it provides.