Tsunemi Yamashita

• Arkansas Tech University

Scorpions, a seemingly primitive, stinging arthropod taxa, are known to exhibit marked diversity in their venom components. These venoms are known for their human pathology, but they are also important as models for therapeutic and drug development applications. In this study, we report a high-quality genome assembly and annotation of the striped b...

Scorpions, a seemingly primitive, stinging arthropod taxa, are known to exhibit marked diversity in their venom components. These venoms are known for their human pathology, but also important as models for therapeutic and drug development applications. We report a high quality genome assembly and annotation of the striped bark scorpion, Centruroid...

Body tissue and venom glands from an eastern population of the scorpion Centruroides vittatus (Say, 1821) were homogenized and molecular constituents removed to characterize putative sodium β toxin gene diversity, RT-qPCR, transcriptomic, and proteomic variation. We cloned sodium β toxins from genomic DNA, conducted RT-qPCR experiments with seven s...

Arthropod Mycoplasma are little known endosymbionts in insects, primarily known as plant disease vectors. Mycoplasma in other arthropods such as arachnids are unknown. We report the first complete Mycoplasma genome sequenced, identified, and annotated from a scorpion, Centruroides vittatus, and designate it as Mycoplasma vittatus. We find the genom...

Arthropod Mycoplasma are little known endosymbionts in insects, primarily known as plant disease vectors. Mycoplasma in other arthropods such as arachnids are unknown. We report the first complete Mycoplasma genome sequenced, identified, and annotated from a scorpion, Centruroides vittatus , and designate it as Mycoplasma vittatus . We find the gen...

The complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of the Striped scorpion (Centruroides vittatus) was assembled from Illumina-based whole genome sequencing. The circular genome is 14,602 bp in length with 13 protein coding genes, 21 tRNA, two rRNAs, a translocation-inversion of tRNALeu compared to the horse shoe crab mitogenome, and the absence of tRN...

Stream drying and in-stream barriers can influence migration and recolonization, yet we know little about how these impact population genetics of fishes. We analyzed microsatellite DNA from two common headwater fishes, Longear Sunfish (Lepomis megalotis) and Highland Stoneroller (Campostoma spadiceum), to compare population genetics of fishes in st...

Assessing the severity of potential barriers to fish movements in headwater streams continues to be a challenging goal. In addition to migration for reproduction, connectivity among habitats can influence extinction and recolonization dynamics as well as source-sink dynamics of metapopulations. This study was designed to characterize the genetic st...

Scorpion systematics and taxonomy have recently shown a need for revision, partially due to insights from molecular techniques. Scorpion taxonomy has been difficult with morphological characters as disagreement exists among researchers with character choice for adequate species delimitation in taxonomic studies. Within the family Buthidae, species...

Population sites, population designations, and GPS coordinates with GenBank accession numbers. (XLSX)

Divergence dates calculated through three BEAST constraints and MDIV. (XLSX)

Divergence time estimates from MDIV between selected population pairs. (XLSX)

Morphological data analysis. (DOC)

Environmental layers taken from the WorldClim data set and Community Climate Model for Environmental Niche Modeling. (DOC)

We examined the population structure of sand scorpions (Paruroctonus mesaensis) by performing genetic and morphological analyses. Sand scorpions were expected to show large genetic distances among populations because they are limited to sandy habitats. However, allozyme analysis showed only moderate genetic differentiation among populations. The mo...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Biology)--Vanderbilt University, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-236).