New papers

Congratulations to Mike Kanost (Kansas State University) and Gary Blissard (Cornell University) who spearheaded our large, international, collaborative project on decyphering the DNA of the tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta)! Manduca is not only an important pest insect of Solanaceae plants (tomatoes, tobacco etc), evolved a number of cool adaptations (e.g. it can happily munch on nicotine-filled leaves) but it is also a major model system for neur [Learn more]

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 hig [Learn more]

Our first paper on our new interest of ecotoxicology has been accepted in PLoS One. A highly polymorphic (in terms of DNA sequence) species, rainbowfish (Melanotaenia fluviatilis) was not the easiest species to work with (hence we refer to circa 44,000 transcripts rather than genes). It certainly needs a new genome project but in the meantime we manually curated the nuclear receptors and steroidogenic enzymes. A figure from the paper: Phylogenet [Learn more]