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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eighth Eye Blind" data-source="post: 241756" data-attributes="member: 49683">I know this is as exciting as a webbed-in fossorial to most people here, but there's some big news in T biology that's sure to stir the hearts of the lab nerds.The first fully annotated genome of a tarantula has been published!A group in China has sequenced the DNA from the entire genome of an OBT and, most importantly, annotated it (mapped it so we know the location of all the chunks and identified all of the parts that are used to make proteins). This is a big deal for T biology and a major step in answering a lot of questions about how they work at the molecular level. Now that this has been successfully accomplished for one species we're sure to get a surge of similar data for lots of others as well. So everyone should stock up on tape for their label printers as we're sure to get big shifts in species names over the coming years. This new genome data will rewrite a lot of the natural history we thought we had already worked out. You can read the paper <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-06507-2" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you're interested. I know this is way too technical for the gross majority of people in the hobby but it does get the wheels spinning for us academic egg-head types. It's party time in the spider lab!</blockquote>