The increased urbanization of a growing global population makes imperative the development of sustainable integrated pest management (IPM) strategies for urban pest control. This emphasizes pests that are closely associated with the health and wellbeing of humans and domesticated animals. Concurrently there are regulatory requirements enforced to minimize inadvertent exposures to insecticides i...

BeetleBase (http://www.beetlebase.org) has been updated to provide more comprehensive genomic information for the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. The database contains genomic sequence scaffolds mapped to 10 linkage groups (genome assembly release Tcas_3.0), genetic linkage maps, the official gene set, Reference Sequences from NCBI (RefSeq), predicted gene models, ESTs and whole-genome ti...

A genetic linkage map was constructed in a backcross family of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, based largely on sequences from bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) ends and untranslated regions from random cDNA's. In most cases, dimorphisms were detected using heteroduplex or single-strand conformational polymorphism analysis after specific PCR amplification. The map incorporates a ...

Hox genes are essential transcription factors that establish segmental identity on the head–tail axis of all animals. Proper regulation of Hox gene expression and function is in part accomplished through the actions of a multitude of noncoding RNAs. One important class of noncoding RNA, the micro-RNAs (miRNAs), regulates gene activity through translational repression. The miR-10 family is highl...

Stochasticity alters the nonlinear dynamics of inherently cycling populations. The power spectrum can describe and explain the impacts of stochasticity. We fitted models to short observed time series of flour beetle populations in the frequency domain, then used a well fitting stochastic mechanistic model to generate detailed predictions of population spectra. Some predicted spectral peaks repr...

The distribution of the maternally acting, selfish gene Medea (M) was determined in populations of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum (Herbst), collected in the southern and midwestern United States. We found clear evidence for the existence of two major regional subpopulations, with a boundary that roughly corresponds to 331N latitude. All 26 strains collected in 10 states north of this...

Rice (Oryza sativa var. Nipponbare) was transformed with an artificial avidin gene. The features of this construct are as follows: (1) a signal peptide sequence derived from barley alpha amylase was added at the N-terminal region, (2) codon usage of the gene was optimized for rice, and (3) the gene was driven by rice glutelin GluB-1, an endosperm-specific promoter. Avidin was produced in the gr...

Functional analysis of the two chitin synthase genes, TcCHS1 and TcCHS2, in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, revealed unique and complementary roles for each gene. TcCHS1-specific RNA interference (RNAi) disrupted all three types of moult (larval-larval, larval-pupal and pupal-adult) and greatly reduced whole-body chitin content. Exon-specific RNAi showed that splice variant 8a of TcC...

A genetic map of the red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) integrating molecular with morphological markers was constructed using a backcross population of 147 siblings. The map defines 10 linkage groups (LGs), presumably corresponding to the 10 chromosomes, and consists of 122 randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers, six molecular markers representing identified genes, and five morp...

BeetleBase (http://www.bioinformatics.ksu.edu/BeetleBase/) is an integrated resource for the Tribolium research community. The red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) is an important model organism for genetics, developmental biology, toxicology and comparative genomics, the genome of which has recently been sequenced. BeetleBase is constructed to integrate the genomic sequence data with informa...