Phylogenomics of scorpions reveal contemporaneous diversification of scorpion mammalian predators and mammal-active sodium channel toxins
Creators
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Santibanez, Carlos1
- Aharon, Shlomi2
- Ballesteros, Jesús3
- Gainett, Guilherme3
- Baker, Caitlin3
- González-Santillán, Edmundo4
- Harvey, Mark5
- Hassans, Mohamed6
- Abu-Almaaty, Ali6
- Aldeyarbi, Shorouk6
- Monod, Lionel7
- Ojanguren-Affilastro, Andrés8
- Pinto da Rocha, Ricardo9
- Zvik, Yoram10
- Gavish-Regev, Efrat2
- Sharma, Prashant3
- 1. Western Connecticut State University
- 2. Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- 3. University of Wisconsin-Madison
- 4. National Autonomous University of Mexico
- 5. Western Australian Museum
- 6. Port Said University
- 7. Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle
- 8. Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum
- 9. Universidade de Sao Paulo
- 10. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Description
Scorpions constitute a charismatic lineage of arthropods and comprise more than 2,500 described species. Found throughout various tropical and temperate habitats, these predatory arachnids have a long evolutionary history, with a fossil record that began in the Silurian. While all scorpions are venomous, the asymmetrically diverse family Buthidae harbors nearly half the diversity of extant scorpions, and all but one of the 58 species that are medically significant to humans. However, the lack of a densely sampled scorpion phylogeny has hindered broader inferences of the diversification dynamics of scorpion toxins. As redress, we assembled a phylogenomic dataset of 100 scorpion venom transcriptomes and/or genomes, emphasizing the sampling of highly toxic buthid genera. To infer divergence times of venom gene families, we applied a phylogenomic node dating approach for the species tree in tandem with phylostratigraphic bracketing to estimate minimum ages of mammal-specific toxins. Our analyses establish a robustly supported phylogeny of scorpions, particularly with regard to relationships between medically significant taxa. Analysis of venom gene families shows that mammal-specific sodium channel toxins have independently evolved in five lineages within Buthidae. Temporal windows of mammal-specific toxin origins are correlated with the basal diversification of major scorpion mammal predators such as carnivores, shrews, bats and rodents. These results suggest an evolutionary model of relatively recent diversification of buthid sodium channel toxin (NaTx) homologs in response to diversification of scorpion predators.
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Datasets_Santibanez_et_al_2022.zip
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Additional details
Related works
- Is cited by
- 10.1093/sysbio/syac021 (DOI)
- Is source of
- 10.5281/zenodo.5639711 (DOI)