Wings INSIDE of the beetle body

Our paper describing the tissues transforming into wings in the Hox mutants of Tribolium is now published in  Arthropod Structure & Development!

We found that ectopic wing tissues are sometimes formed even inside of the beetle body, and was also able to show that two distinct tissues (of tergal and pleural nature) can independently transform into wings. This work was only possible because of hours and hours of dedicated works by Maddy and Courtney!

Also, check out the entire issue, which is the insect wing special issue: “Wings and Powered Flight: Core Novelties in Insect Evolution“. A lot of cool insect wing papers!!

Finding enhancers in beetles

Our paper on establishing enhancer studies in beetles is now published in Development! Hope the approach and recourses we established will help facilitate more enhancer studies in non-Drosophila insects :-)

We made all of our FAIRE data available (NCBI GEO link here), so you can take a look at your genes and hunt for your enhancers. The piggyBac reporter plasmids reported in the paper are now also showcased in this page. More new constructs coming soon!

This work was not possible without the help of the awesome collaborators, Marc Halfon (University at Buffalo), Dan McKay (UNC Chapel Hill), Ezzat El-Sherif (Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät), as well as the dedicated work of Yi-Ting and other members!

 

On the origin of insect wings…

Our mini-review recapping the insect wing origin debate and featuring a recent cool paper from Mann and Estella labs is now published on Current Biology.

“Sometime in the Devonian, perhaps about 400 million years ago, insects became the first clade to conquer the sky. Recent evo-devo studies have begun to unravel the mysterious origin of the flight structure that made insects into extraordinary six-legged fliers.”

Hope this will be a good primer when you want to learn how six legged flying buggers have evolved!  link

On Media

Our work has been featured on some science news outlets. Here are some links!

Growing wings on beetle abdomens provides another clue in the mystery of where insect wings come from. The VERGE

Image of the Day: Ectopic Wings. The Scientist

The origin of insect wings has been revealed by gene editing. New Scientist

Also, here is  the behind-the-paper story written by David. Very fun to read. Highly recommend!

Can a beetle with 12 extra wings help explore the evolutionary origin of insect wings? Nature ecology & evolution Community

Functional cis studies in beetles

Still preprint, but the manuscript regarding our effort to establish a system to analyze enhancers in Tribolium is now available on bioRxiv (link).

We had a lot of struggles to make this work, but we also had a lot of fun collaborating with Dan, Marc, and Ezzat. This work was not possible at all without their help. No celebration yet, as we still need to find good home for this manuscript (fingers crossed), but hope this is a big step forward in insect evodevo!

We made all of our FAIRE data available (NCBI GEO link here), so you can take a look at your genes and hunt for your enhancers!

Summer recap 2: COIS insect evo-devo issue

The special issue of Current Opinion in Insect Science that Yoshi Tomoyasu and Haruhiko Fujiwara at Tokyo University edited came out during the summer. The section “Development and regulation: The diverse traits that have facilitated the successful radiation of insects” (link) contains a lot of cool review articles on insect evo-devo, so don’t miss it :-) Here is the editorial overview (pdf). Huge thanks to all the contributed authors who made this special issue possible!