Silvestri's Northern Forcepstail Genome Project


Silvestri's Northern Forcepstail (Catajapyx aquilonaris)

Silvestri's Northern Forcepstail

Silvestri's Northern Forcepstail

Photo by Nikola Szucsich

Source: 
The Bonn group,
Oliver Niehuis

Researchers involved:
Size (or size of nearest relative): 304 MBp

Keywords (and why important): (systematics)

Representative of Diplura: the japygid Catajapyx aquilonaris is a blind predator of the soil. Like Protura (Acerentomon maius) and Collembola (Sminthurus viridis), Diplura lack wings, mirroring the wingless insect ancestor. Like in all primarily wingless hexapods, sperms are not transferred directly during copulation. Males rather deposit a spermatophore on the ground and females subsequently take the spermatophore up.

Diplura are critical for understanding the evolutionary origin of Hexapoda (e.g., terrestrialization), the evolutionary origin of wings (ancestral condition in Diplura), and the evolution of direct sperm transfer (ancestral condition in Diplura).

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.