TY - JOUR T1 - An RNA Virome associated to the Golden orb-weaver Spider <em>Nephila clavipes</em> JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/140814 SP - 140814 AU - Humberto J. Debat Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/22/140814.abstract N2 - The golden orb-weaver Nephila clavipes is an abundant and widespread, sexual dimorphic spider species. The first annotated genome of orb-weaver spiders, exploring N. clavipes, has been reported recently. This remarkable study, focused primarily in the diversity of silk specific genes, shed light into the complex evolutionary history of spiders. Furthermore, a robust, multiple and tissue specific transcriptome analysis provided a massive resource for N. clavipes RNA survey. Here, I present evidence towards the discovery and characterization of viral sequences corresponding to the first extant virus species associated to N. clavipes and the Nephilidae family. The putative new species are linked to ssRNA positive-strand viruses, such as Picornavirales, but also to ssRNA negative-strand and dsRNA viruses. In addition, I detected sequence data of new strains of two recently reported arthropod viruses, which complemented and extended the corresponding sequence references. The identified viruses appear to be complete, potentially functional, and presenting the typical architecture and consistent viral domains. The intrinsic nature of the detected sequences and their absence in the recently generated genome assembly, suggest that they correspond to bona fide RNA virus sequences. The available RNA data allowed for the first time to address a tissue/organ specific analysis of virus loads/presence in spiders, suggesting a complex spatial and differential distribution of the tentative viruses, encompassing the spider brain, and also silk and venom glands. Until recently, the virus landscape associated to spiders remained elusive. The discovered viruses described here, provide only a fragmented glimpse of the potential magnitude of the Aranea virosphere. Future studies should focus not only on complementing and expanding these preceding findings, but also on addressing the potential ecological role of these viruses, which might influence the biology of these outstanding arthropod species. ER -