蜘蛛分子系统学研究进展

Spider is one of the oldest and highest diverse groups of organisms on our planet, with fossil records dating back to the Devonian (c. 380 million years ago). Although the long-term studies on spider systematics were based mainly on morphological characters, in recent years, much progress has been made on the spider molecular systematics which benefited from the continuously improving of molecular technology. Phylogenetic trees of certain groups were constructed by using molecular data only or combining with morphological data; some groups of spider had been well studied; not only mitochondrial DNA (such as COI, 16S and 12S), but also nuclear DNA (such as 18S, 28S and Histone 3) were chosen as molecular markers; the state-of-the-art methods or phylogeny programs were used for data analysis. It was these works that formed the basis of a solid foundation for the understanding of the spider tree of life. In the present paper, research progress of the spider molecular systematics has summarized and discussed for the further study of this field.