Genomics of singing insects
Crickets and katydids – the Ensifera – are charismatic minifauna. They sing, they fight, they woo. Some give huge goopy spermatophylaxes to their mates, some band together in their millions and march across the land. They mimic leaves, they mimic bark, they mimic ants. Some make tools out of leaves. Others shoot blood into the eyes of their enemies. Despite crickets’ historic use as models in sexual selection, acoustic communication, neuroethology, behavioural ecology and other fields of research, genomic resources lag those of other insect groups.
We are fixing this by doing a lot of genome sequencing. In 2020 we published the first annotated cricket genome scaffolded to linkage groups aka chromosomes, for Teleogryllus oceanicus. In the intervening time that assembly has become rather quaint in its fragmentedness, and we’ve produced a massively improved, highly complete, chromosome-contiguous v.2.0. Others are on the way. But the point isn’t to collect genomes, it’s to use them wisely. This work involves many collaborators across the world, and if you would like to be one of them, we’d like to hear from you. It’s a community of researchers committed to open science, cooperative discovery, and supporting early career researchers.