ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights advances in our understanding of insect physiology and endocrinology that have been realized in the post-genomic era. This is timely because of the rapid change brought about by genome projects, functional genomics and genetics (so called “omics” technologies) that include transcriptomics, proteomics, peptidomics, metabolomics, and reverse genetic tools (e.g., dsRNA) for gene silencing (see Boerjan et al. 2012, Hoffmann et al. this book, Burse and Boland this book). All of these help unravel complex regulatory processes. Thus, the fi eld of insect physiology and endocrinology has advanced dramatically in recent times since the original sequencing of the Drosophila genome (Adams et al. 2000). Genomes from many insect species are now available and the importance of such information is illustrated by the i5k project (https:// www.arthropodgenomes.org/wiki/i5K) whose ambition is to sequence genomes from 5,000 insects and related arthropods. This project will be
transformative and consolidate the discipline in the 21st century. Its aims, as listed on the website above, are “to sequence the genomes of all insect species known to be important to worldwide agriculture, food safety, medicine, and energy production; all those used as models in biology; the most abundant in world ecosystems; and representatives in every branch of insect phylogeny so as to achieve a deep understanding of arthropod evolution and phylogeny”. With such massive comparative data, researchers will be able to make relevant comparisons between molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, and organismal features. When coupled with another bold initiative, the Genome 10K project (which aims to assemble the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate species (https://www.genome10k.org/), the comparisons can truly be extended to evolution and phylogeny.
