Maruyama et al. BMC Genomics 2010, 11:363 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/11/363 Page 13 of 17 Figure 5 Dendogram of glycine-rich proteins that present similarities with cement-like proteins. Transcripts of proteins described in this work ( : R. microplus; : R. sanquineus; ß: A. cajennense) and transcripts of proteins obtained in the annotated catalog of Francischetti et al. (2009) were used to construct phylogenies (Amb var: A. variegatum; Amby am: A. americanum; Amb caj: A. cajennense; Der and: D. andersoni; Rh ap: R. appendiculatus; Rh micro: R. microplus, the numbers refer to contig in Sup-Table1 [18]). major ampullate spidroin and flag silks. Each one of these fibers is composed of one or more proteins encoded by the silk fibroin gene family. Spiders draw fibers from dis- solved fibroin proteins that are stored in specialized sets of abdominal glands [27]. It is interesting to note that ticks generate silk-like proteins from their salivary glands, while spiders use abdominal glands for this purpose and reserve their salivary glands for production of venom. Tick silk-like GRPs may possibly support mechanical needs (e.g., fixation to host skin), as well as the capture of prey and predators (respectively, blood and cytotoxic leu- kocytes). Spider silks are being employed as scaffolds for