🦋 WE ARE STILL ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR OUR PHD PROGRAM IN EVOLUTIONARY & DEVELOPMENTAL GENOMICS!!! Application closes on February 27th!
Check out one of our beloved PhD students, Samuele Broccardo. He describes his work in the video below! 🦋
evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi...
Do you work (/want to work) with caterpillars? Or sensory systems? Or BOTH?! Well good golly do we have the paper for you! We explain the senses that caterpillars have, what they use them for, and how anthropogenic sensory pollution might be messing it all up 🐛 doi.org/10.1007/s003...
A personal favorite, long time in the making. Adelina and David (@dduneau.bsky.social) were instrumental in getting this done.
doi.org/10.1186/s129...
The very hungry caterpillar became a fluttering butterfly
uniofbrighton-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/univers...
Heliconius charothonia with expanded yellow forewing band
Look at these weirdos that are coming out in the stock🤓 any hypothesis??
Lepidopteran scales in 250 million year old poop: www.science.org/content/arti...
Has anyone ever figured out what causes larvae of crispr injected eggs to come out like this (merged or partially merged abdominal segments). I have followed then before and they are never mutants.
Anyone know what causes this mottled brown phenotype , it happens in the stock sometimes and crispr injections a lot, it often has clean curved line in both distal FW and is limited to one HW in those specific segments. Although sometimes it is just a little bit in the FW.
Exciting cluster hire of post-docs and PhD students at U Puerto Rico, on Butterfly Functional Genomics and more.
Spread widely
evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi...
Psiguria pedata flowers for the butterflies 😎
Pretty big spermatophore in there
Left: Using genome-wide association analyses, VanKuren and colleagues show that separate loci within the K locus control a white-yellow color switch and contribute to variation in male preference, respectively, in a polymorphic population of Heliconius cydno in Ecuador. The full geographical range of H. cydno is shown on the map in light blue. The approximate location of the color pattern gene Aristaless-1 is shown for reference; other genes (not shown) are also present in the K locus, including some that are differentially expressed during the development of visual processing regions of the insect brain. In this and other H. cydno populations, white-yellow wing coloration correlates with the proportion of inhibited UV-photoreceptors, suggesting a compelling mechanism for the evolution of visual preference. Right: Individual ommatidia in the butterfly eye are composed of multiple photoreceptors. Inter-photoreceptor synaptic connections are known to exist within the lamina, the upper layer of the optic lobe, itself the region of the insect brain responsible for initial visual processing.
Bright colors observed across the animal world are often used during mate choice. @dickmerrill.bsky.social explores a @plosbiology.org study of genetic & neural mechanisms contributing to evolution of visual mating decisions in Heliconius butterflies 🧪 Paper: plos.io/4iHQDRd Primer: plos.io/4ipW7QS
Top left: Cartoon showing how the eye is organized into ommatidia containing nine photoreceptors (left), with distinct ommatidial types typically defined by the opsin expression patterns in the R1 and R2 cells (right). R1/R2 axons bypass the lamina (LA) and project directly to the medulla (ME), while R3-8 project only to the lamina where they can also make inter-photoreceptor synaptic connections with R1/R2 axons. Bottom left: Representative anti-UV1 and anti-UV2 antibody stains in three representative white H. c. alithea males showing consistent expression of UV2 and variable expression of UV1 across individuals. Right: These white Heliconius cydno alithea butterflies are mating on a passionflower vine, but the male had a choice between white and yellow-winged females. Image credit: Wei Lu.
Neural circuits that link genetic variation to #behavior: This study of mate choice behavior in Heliconius cydno #butterflies shows that alterations to the peripheral nervous system, driven by genetic & gene expression differences, can alter essential behaviors 🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/4iHQDRd
Thrilled to share that this paper is out now in Development! journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...
Has survived 10 years of spring cleaning, not sure if it's gonna make the cut this time 🫡
CRISPR friends, is lyophilized Cas9 stored at -80 for 6-12 months still good to resuspend and use?
Papa Lab Christmas door competition entry 2024 🎄🦋
