Timely trigger of caterpillar zombie behaviour: temporal requirements for light in baculovirus-induced tree-top disease

Baculovirus infection triggers a positive phototactic response in caterpillars to induce 'tree-top' disease.

Many parasites manipulate host behaviour to enhance parasite transmission and survival. A fascinating example is baculoviruses, which often induce death in caterpillar hosts at elevated positions ('tree-top' disease). To date, little is known about the underlying processes leading to this adaptive host manipulation. Here, we show that the baculovirus Spodoptera exigua multiple nucleopolyhedrovi...

Timely plant defenses protect against caterpillar herbivory.

A s sessile, photosynthetic organisms, plants benefit greatly from a circadian clock that adjusts their overall metabolism in anticipation of the highly predictable arrival of sunrise and sunset. Thus, it is not surprising that about one-third of all plant genes show evidence of circadian regulation in their expression patterns (1, 2). However, closer examination of this diurnally regulated tra...

Parasitic Manipulation of Host Behaviour: Baculovirus SeMNPV EGT Facilitates Tree-Top Disease in Spodoptera exigua Larvae by Extending the Time to Death

Many parasites enhance their dispersal and transmission by manipulating host behaviour. One intriguing example concerns baculoviruses that induce hyperactivity and tree-top disease (i.e., climbing to elevated positions prior to death) in their caterpillar hosts. Little is known about the underlying mechanisms of such parasite-induced behavioural changes. Here, we studied the role of the ecdyste...

Top Trigger Efficiency Measurements and the top trigger package

One-Visit Caterpillar Tree Automata

We study caterpillar tree automata [3] that are restricted to enter any subtree at most one time (or k times). We show that, somewhat surprisingly, the deterministic one-visit automata can already, for instance, evaluate trees where the nodes represent some non-associative operations. We show that there exist regular tree languages that cannot be accepted by a one-visit automaton, thus proving ...