T. Ryan Gregory and David P. Shorthouse
Journal of Heredity 94: 285-290.
Abstract
Spiders represent a diverse and familiar group of
animals,
but to date no information has been made available regarding their
genome
sizes. Arachnids in general have been almost entirely overlooked,
and
are currently represented by a single tick in the animal genome size
dataset.
The present study provides new genome size estimates for 115 species of
spiders
from 19 families (all from the Infraorder Araneomorphae), thereby
adding
considerably to the coverage of these arthropods. No clear-cut
patterns
of variation were detectable even with this relatively large dataset,
but
some interesting avenues for future research have been illuminated by
this
preliminary survey.
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