Texas A&M AgriLife Today just posted a feature story about our ongoing efforts to use genome editing to find new ways to protect plants from insect pests. In addition to being very cool science in collaboration with Anjel Helms (A&M Entomology) and Mike Thomson (A&M Crop Genome Editing Lab), the project also serves as an excellent example of public-industry partnership. Cotton Inc. has been involved from the very beginning providing the initial support to get the project off the ground, support a graduate student, and collect some initial data (thanks, Mason!). This allowed the project to grow to the point where we applied for and received a grant to carry on from the USDA – National Institute for Agriculture that is being jointly funded by the Cotton Board. At every step, this project has benefited from the support and feedback from the cotton industry to help address major issues in cotton production with the goal of providing sustainable environmental and economic benefits across the board (no pun intended!).

So rewarding to see Darron Cullen’s study of density-dependent color change in adult desert locusts finally get published – in PNAS nonetheless!

The project originated at the University of Sydney over a decade ago when Darron was a PhD student co-advised by Steve Simpson and Greg. The idea of manipulating locust coloration and using the altered insects in mate choice experiments came about after Darron successfully silenced the yellow protein gene in male Locusta migratoria using RNAi. Since then, he’s kept the dream alive in multiple labs around the world and shifted over to the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) as a model system. As if seeing your students succeed isn’t enough, this study is particularly satisfying because it expands the work I did a couple decades ago (damn, I’m old!) on density-dependent warning coloration in juvenile locusts to adults. Interestingly, the same gene is involved in density-dependent color change, but the ecological function of its expression varies. The color patterns expressed by crowded juvenile locusts function as an interspecific warning signal advertising unprofitability to predators, but later in adult male locusts, becoming bright yellow when crowded acts as an intraspecific warning signal to other males in crowded swarms to help avoid mate choice mistakes and reduce male-male competition. Working with my old friend, Gil Rosenthal, to make sure we got the sexual selection aspects correct was a super special bonus!

Here’s a link to the PNAS open access article: Sexual repurposing of juvenile aposematism in locusts

And a couple of the press releases so far:

Century-old Locust Mystery Uncovered by New Research

Study identifies sex-adapted color-change gene in locusts (also source of the photo above)

An excellent non-technical summary on Kudos. 

Full story here.

I almost cried when I told my lab about this announcement (they’ll probably say I sobbed like a baby). Words can’t express how something like this feels. I owe so much to so many people – literally over the course of my life – for help getting to this point. And we’re not done yet!

If you would have told this kid that someday he’d be a fancy Regents Professor, he quite likely would have laughed in your face, burped some cheap beer, and asked, “What in the hell is that?”

Thrilled to be starting a new USDA-NIFA funded project investigating the continental-scale population genomics of the Fall armyworm with recent lab graduate, Dr. Ashley Tessnow. The project stems from Ashley’s dissertation research. She played a huge role in writing the grant which will fund her research for the next three years as a postdoc. The work involves a multi-year coast-to-coast US sampling effort made possible by an essential network of university and USDA collaborators. Read more about the project here.