DNA of the Web

30% of people in the US are afraid of spiders while others are the ones to kill or capture them. Charles Xu of the University of Notre Dame along with his team were the ones to create a way to study spiders without even having to interact with one. With the use of black widow spiders and their prey, the house cricket they found a way to non invasively extract, amplify and sequence MitochondrialDNA that was left on the web. A spider's web can hold the DNA of itself and its prey for up to 88 days. Their lab study is the first to have a source of noninvasive genetic material and could help many different field scientists in the future.

Some of the people that could find use in this new technique are conservation researchers, pest management, and biodiversity surveyors, among others.Conservation can benefit from this by taking a web in a particular area of study and find out what species had been in the web. With this information they could possible help that particular endangered spider or insect by conserving that area. Pest management could use the technique to find what spider species are hiding in crates being imported from one place to another. They could also find what species are invading households in an area. Though much more testing is needed, especially out in field, there is a good outlook for these types of scientists.

This was interesting to find due to the fact that it is a noninvasive technique. Which seems unrealistic because of how small the species are. I am not a huge spider fan or insect fan, but I can see how this is important to these types of science. I wonder if they can figure out how to perfect this technique if they could use it for other areas in science.