Brown Recluse Spider Genome Project

Image source: Ladyb695 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa)

Contact: Greta Binford

Researchers involved: 650
Size (or size of nearest relative): 1125 MBp

Keywords (and why important): Novel chemistry, evolutionary branching.

Potentially lethal toxin. Model organism for understanding dermonecrotic envenomation (sphingomylinase D). Focus of research to understand neurotic fractions in venom. Provides appropriate phylogenetic sampling across diversity of order Araneae. Easily obtained from colleagues in Oregon.

Genomic Resources


For the most current version of the assembly, please use 'NCBI BioProject' (find link below). If the assembly is unavailable in the BioProject page (it is still being worked on), you can look under the 'BCM-HGSC data' (find link below) for intermediate versions of the assembly.


Web Apollo: A web-based sequence annotation editor for community annotation

For information about Web Apollo, please contact Monica Poelchau.

Additional Resources

Learn more about the brown recluse spider