Caerostris darwini Genome sequencing and assembly

Stronger than steel, tougher than KevlarTM, yet lighter than either of these man-made materials, synthetic spider silks have the potential to transform medicine and industry. However, the complete repertoire of genes responsible for the main components of spider silks, "spidroin" proteins, is not known, and our understanding of the structure of these genes is limited. To improve our understanding, we sequenced and assembled the complete genome of Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini). We also provide 8 de novo assembled transcriptomes from a range of tissues including individual silk glands, as well as 30 sequences from the spidroin gene family assembled from long single molecule real-time sequencing reads