With Wei Xu (of Murdoch Uni), Alisha Anderson (CSIRO) and Huijie Zhang we just got our new Heliothine paper accepted at Nature's Scientific Reports and discovered a new subfamily of the gustatory chemosensory receptors!
With about 180 gustatory genes, this highly polyphagous species (cotton bollworm) is one of the richest and most diverse with regards to this family. It is likely that this gene diversity is linked to its ability to survive on highly (chemically) diverse host plants.
The result of a major effort during Wei and Alexie's post-docs involving sequencing the genome of Helicoverpa armigera, annotation with deep RNA-seq, manual curation and a number of functional experiments.