Project description:Transcriptional profiling of phytoplasma grown in plant (Chrysanthemum coronarium) and grown in insect (Macrosteles striifrons). Two-condition experiment, phytoplasma-infected plant and phytoplasma-infected insect. Biological replicates: 6 phytoplasma-infected plants and 6 phytoplasma-infected insects, independently grown and harvested. One replicate per array.
Project description:Transcriptional profiling of phytoplasma grown in plant (Chrysanthemum coronarium) and grown in insect (Macrosteles striifrons). Two-condition experiment, phytoplasma-infected plant and phytoplasma-infected insect. Biological replicates: 4 phytoplasma-infected plants and 4 phytoplasma-infected insects, independently grown and harvested. One replicate per array.
Project description:Is there a correlation between miRNA diversity and levels of organismic complexity? Exhibiting extraordinary levels of morphological and developmental complexity, insects are the most diverse animal class on earth. Their evolutionary success was in particular shaped by the innovation of holometabolan metamorphosis in endopterygotes. Previously, miRNA evolution had been linked to morphological complexity, but astonishing variation in the currently available miRNA complements of insects made this link unclear. To address this issue, we sequenced the miRNA complement of the hemimetabolan Blattella germanica and reannotated that of two other hemimetabolan species, Locusta migratoria and Acyrthosiphon pisum, and of four holometabolan species, Apis mellifera, Tribolium castaneum, Bombyx mori and Drosophila melanogaster. Our analyses show that the variation of insect miRNAs is an artefact mainly resulting from poor sampling and inaccurate miRNA annotation, and that insects share a conserved microRNA toolkit of 65 families exhibiting very low variation. For example, the evolutionary shift toward a complete metamorphosis was accompanied only by the acquisition of three and the loss of one miRNA families.
Project description:We report the application of Chromatraps® Solid-State Chromatin Immunoprecipitation technology for epigenetic profiling of histone modifications in insects. Here, we present the optimised protocol and conditions of Chromatrap® kits for successful ChIP and high-throughput sequencing of established model species, Drosophila melanogaster and the emerging model for behavioural plasticity Nicrophorus vespilloides. We highlight successful ChIP-seq of Drosophila melanogaster (Oregon-R) of comparable quality to modENCODE data and present successful enrichment of histone marks for Nicrophorus vespilloides. The addition of this insect-based ChIP-seq protocol provides a set of optimal guidelines to aid streamline end-users epigenetic research focus and reduce experimental time.
Project description:The control of insect borne disease is recognized as one of the major agricultural, animal and human health challenges of today. Viruses in the family Luteoviridae are phloem-limited, plant viruses that are vectored by aphids in a circulative manner. They are responsible for a wide-range of economically important disease in almost all staple food crops. In order to be transmitted, these viruses require species-specific passage of the pathogen across several membrane barriers within the insect. After the pathogen is ingested from the sap of an infected plant, the virus moves across and through the aphid gut into the hemoceol (insect blood) where it circulates until it reaches and enters the main or accessory salivary glands. From here, the pathogen is injected into a new plant host when the aphid feeds. The identification of insect proteins that interact with circulative plant viruses is technically challenging and a major goal for the plant vector biology field. Such information is critical to develop novel control strategies that block virus transmission by insects. In this study, we used affinity purification-high-resolution mass spectrometry (AP-MS) to rapidly capture and identify aphid proteins in complex with Potato leafroll virus (PLRV), a luteovirid transmitted by the green peach aphid (Myzus persicae), directly from viruliferous aphid tissue.