Project description:The present project deals with bark beetle gut total proteome from callow and black bark beetle, Ips typographus. The study aims to identify life stage-specific expression of gut proteins in bark beetles and their functional relevance.
Project description:Survey of relative gene expression profiles in larvae, pupae, and midguts and fatbodies of teneral, unfed, and fed adult mountain pine beetles from western Nevada, USA.
Project description:16S amplicon pool analyses of the four gut sections of the wood-feeding beetle, Odontotaenius disjunctus The beetle is purely wood feeding, and we aim to first characterize the community that exist within the gut sections 4 beetles, four gut sections per beetle, one PhyloChip per gut section, total = 16 chips
Project description:Survey of relative gene expression profiles in larvae, pupae, and midguts and fatbodies of teneral, unfed, and fed adult mountain pine beetles from western Nevada, USA. Array prepared on 4-tile chips (4-plex custom arrays), each feature represented by six different oligonucleotides, three replicate blocks/tile, hybridized with total RNA from 11 samples, each replicated four times. Vector (pDONR222) and two plant sequences included as negative controls.
Project description:Genome-wide survey of transcriptional differences between males and females of Tribolium castaneum, the red flour beetle Four biological replicates for male and female beetles with 20 individuals per replicate. Two technical replicates, one replicate per sex. 16,434 genes/expressed non-coding regions represented twice on each array. Three 60 mer probes for most exons/expressed non-coding regions. 167,538 unique genomic probes replicated twice per array.
Project description:Understanding how novel complex traits originate is a foundational challenge in evolutionary biology. Yet how descent with modification in developmental evolution may lead to morphological innovation remains poorly understood. We investigated the origin of thoracic horns in scarabaeine beetles, one of the most dramatic classes of secondary sexual traits in the animal kingdom. We show that thoracic horns derive from bilateral source tissues, that diverse wing genes are functionally required for instructing this process, and that in the absence of Hox-input thoracic horn primordia transform to contribute to ectopic wings. Once induced, however, the transcriptional profile of thoracic horns diverges markedly from that of wings and other wing serial homologs. Our results provide evidence for the serial homology between thoracic horns and insects wings, and suggest that other insect innovations may similarly derive from wing serial homologs and the concomitant recruitment of diverse genes from outside a wing formation context.