Red Flour Beetle's Genome Sequenced For The First Time

75% of all animal species in the world are insects. The largest group within insects are beetles (400,000 species). Beetles can be very beautiful and colorful, but many beetle species are also serious agricultural pests that can destroy food plants like potatoes (the Colorado potato beetle) and threaten large areas of forest. Altogether, insect pests cause U.S. $ 26 billion in losses to U.S. agriculture yearly and beetles are responsible for a substantial part of this.

A pest for dried commodities such as corn, maize, rice, and flour, is the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. A large international research consortium consisting of 64 research groups from 14 countries with the participation of a research team around Professor Cornelis Grimmelikhuijzen has now sequenced the genome from Tribolium.

This genome consists of about 200 million nucleotides (DNA building blocks) that code for about 16,000 genes (or 16,000 proteins). These sequencing efforts are extremely important for agriculture and will enable the development of new methods for the protection of food plants against beetles.

The results are also important to better understand the biology of the other beetle species, whose genome has not been sequenced yet. This makes Tribolium to the favorite model system in beetle research, says Cornelis Grimmelikhuijzen.

"We've been able to exploit Tribolium's ease of culture, short life cycle, and facile genetics to create an array of sophisticated methodologies," said Kansas State University professor Rob Denell who was involved in the research. "It now joins the fruit fly Drosophila as a premier insect genetic system, and even offers advantages in some areas of study."

This research was published in the journal Nature March 27, 2008.