A project led by the University of Barcelona and the University of La Laguna will sequence the complete genome of the spider Dysdera curvisetae, a species endemic to the Canary Islands that has its natural habitat in the intertidal zone in the coast of Tenerife. This initiative is one of the twenty projects to be promoted by the European Reference Genome Atlas Consortium (ERGA) - the European node of the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) - which aims to sequence reference genomes of species of eukaryotic organisms to improve the management and conservation of biodiversity in European territory.
The D. curvisetae genome sequencing project , led by experts Sara Guirao and Julio Rozas, from the UB's Faculty of Biology and the Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (IRBio) of, and Nuria Macías, from the research group Systematics, Biogeography and Evolution of Arthropods of the Canary Islands, from the Faculty of Biology of the University of La Laguna.
A species living in an increasingly threatened habitat
To date, the species Dysdera curvisetae has only been identified in three very distant localities on the island of Tenerife but, according to researcher Sara Guirao, "its distribution may be more extensive". Guirao, from the UB's Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics, explains that this species "belongs to the genus Dysdera, which is the genus of spiders with the highest species richness in the Canary Islands archipelago. It is a genus that has diversified greatly in the islands and more than fifty endemic species are known, that is, those that are exclusive to this archipelago".
