USDA campaign poster to stop the spread of the invasive pest UPDATE October 2019 – This paper has now been published in Gigascience. Stop, Scrape, Squash… and Sequence! The latest invasive insect to hit headlines, the spotted lanternfly, has a voracious, indiscriminate appetite, with a particular taste for apples, grapes and maple — bad news for the wine, orchard and syrup industries of New England, where the Asian pest has been spotted. But there’s good news too, thanks to the expanded capacity of the new Sequel II System. USDA scientists were able to generate a high-quality, 2.3 Gb de novo…
Anopheles coluzzii mosquito UPDATED January 18, 2019 This paper is now available at Genes. ORIGINAL POST December 19, 2018 High-quality reference and de novo genomes have been celebrated by geneticists, population biologists and conservationists alike, but it’s been a dream deferred for entomologists and others grappling with limited DNA samples, due to previous relatively high DNA input requirements (~5 μg for standard library protocol). A new low-input protocol now makes it possible to create high-quality de novo genome assemblies from just 100 ng of starting genomic DNA, without the need for time-consuming inbreeding or pooling strategies. The targeted release date for…
It’s a murder mystery of massive proportion, albeit on a miniature scale: Male-killing among several species of insects, caused by selfish symbiotic bacteria. Swiss researchers believe they have finally solved a question that has stumped scientists for decades, with potential implications for pest and infection control. Researchers have identified the toxin responsible for selective killing of male fruit flies (left) using PacBio sequencing. In a recent Nature publication, Toshiyuki Harumoto and Bruno Lemaitre of the Global Health Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, have reported their findings regarding a toxin in Spiroplasma poulsonii, one…