Whole genome duplication in arachnids - what happened next?
About 430 million years ago spiders and scorpions evolved from a common ancestor that had experienced a whole genome duplication (WGD) The genetic remnants of this WGD event (genes called ohnologs) can still be found in the genome of the approximately 45,000 species of these animals alive today and these ohnologs may have contributed to their adaptation and diversification. Interestingly, the WGD in arachnids like scorpions and spiders was contemporary with independent WGDs in vertebrates. This presents an opportunity to compare these events to determine if there are general principals underlying the outcomes of WGDs and their contribution to animal diversification. Therefore, the aims of this project are to identify arachnid ohnologs, explore how they have contributed to the evolutionary success of these animals, and compare the outcomes of this event to WGD in vertebrates. This includes sequencing new genomes and transcriptomes of species occupying key phylogenetic positions. Overall design: To provide a chromosome-level genome assembly for the key early-diverging clade Synspermiata, we generated RNA-Seq of a whole adult to assist in annotation