Butterfly eyes are complex organs that are composed of a diversity of proteins and they play a central role in visual signaling and ultimately, speciation and adaptation. Here, we utilized the whole eye transcriptome to ...

Background: Insects are the most diverse group of animals which have established intricate evolutionary interactions with bacteria. However, the importance of these interactions is still poorly understood. Few studies have ...

Chemosensory communication is essential to insect biology, play-ing indispensable roles during mate-finding, foraging, and ovipo-sition behaviors. These traits are particularly important during speciation, where chemical ...

Although animals display a rich variety of shapes and patterns, the genetic changes that explain how complex forms arise are still unclear. Here we take advantage of the extensive diversity of Heliconius butterflies to ...

Butterfly color patterns provide visible and biodiverse phenotypic readouts of the patterning processes. Although the secreted ligand WntA has been shown to instruct the color pattern formation in butterflies, its mode of ...

We here pioneer a low-cost assembly strategy for 20 Heliconiini genomes to characterize the evolutionary history of the rapidly radiating genus Heliconius . A bifurcating tree provides a poor fit to the data, and we therefore ...

Little is known about the extent to which species use homologous regulatory architectures to achieve phenotypic convergence. By characterizing chromatin accessibility and gene expression in developing wing tissues, we ...

To what extent can we predict how evolution occurs? Do genetic architectures and developmental processes canalize the evolution of similar outcomes in a predictable manner? Or do historical contingencies impose alternative ...

Mimicry whereby warning signals in different species evolve to look similar has long served as a paradigm of convergent evolution. Little is known, however, about the genes that underlie the evolution of mimetic phenotypes ...