UT Arlington professor provides sex-determination expertise in Nature paper

New study could help farmers fight the spider miteAndre Pires da Silva, a University of Texas at Arlington assistant professor of biology, is one of five principal investigators on a recent effort to map the genome of the two-spotted spider mite, or Tetranychus urticae, one of agriculture’s most resilient and detrimental pests. Pires da Silva, an evolutionary biologist, examined and interpreted the genome results to learn more about the spider mite’s reproduction. He found that the genes involved in determining what sex offspring develop into are unlike any other known examples in