Amazing stuff!
They researched descendants of bed bugs hit by atomic bombs in 1945? How transferable are these results to bed bugs from other regions of the world?
"Bed bugs are notoriously difficult to remove once they’ve moved in – and they’re getting more difficult, thanks to their evolving resistance to insecticides.
A team of researchers has mapped the genomes of bed bug strains, aiming to find out why a “superstrain” has become 20,000 times more resistant to treatment. ...
In this study, researchers collected DNA from 2 bed bug sources.
One population, judged vulnerable to pesticides, had been originally collected from fields in Nagasaki, Japan, but maintained in a lab for 68 years.
The other population was collected from a hotel in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2010. ..."
From the abstract:
"Insecticide resistance in the bed bug Cimex lectularius is poorly understood due to the lack of genome sequences for resistant strains. In Japan, we identified a resistant strain of C. lectularius that exhibits a higher pyrethroid resistance ratio compared to many previously discovered strains.
We sequenced the genomes of the pyrethroid-resistant and susceptible strains using long-read sequencing, resulting in the construction of highly contiguous genomes (N50 of the resistant strain: 2.1 Mb and N50 of the susceptible strain: 1.5 Mb). Gene prediction was performed by BRAKER3, and the functional annotation was performed by the Fanflow4insects workflow.
Next, we compared their amino acid sequences to identify gene mutations, identifying 729 mutated transcripts that were specific to the resistant strain. Among them, those defined previously as resistance genes were included. Additionally, enrichment analysis implicated DNA damage response, cell cycle regulation, insulin metabolism, and lysosomes in the development of pyrethroid resistance. Genome editing of these genes can provide insights into the evolution and mechanisms of insecticide resistance. This study expanded the target genes to monitor allele distribution and frequency changes, which will likely contribute to the assessment of resistance levels. These findings highlight the potential of genome-wide approaches to understand insecticide resistance in bed bugs."
Genome-Wide Search for Gene Mutations Likely Conferring Insecticide Resistance in the Common Bed Bug, Cimex lectularius (open access)
Figure 2. Transcripts with mutations in the resistant strain. (a) The number of mutation sites per transcript is shown by circles. (b–g) Mutation sites of candidate resistance genes are shown with different amino acids.
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