Insect Research Group, University College London
We are excited to announce the start of our BBSRC- “Bioinformatics and Biological Resources Fund” grant to help build next generation agri-ecology workflows and their respective communities.
We used samples from the Big Wasp Survey to analyse the population genetic structure of the Common Yellowjacket, Vespula vulgaris across the UK. You can read the paper here (Open Access).
In January of 2023, Prof Seirian Sumner and post-doc Dr Cintia Oi travelled to Brazil to carry out work as part of their project Secrets to a Successful Hunt: Integrating Genomes, Chemistry and Behaviour in Neotropical Solitary Wasps (read full details of this collaborative international NERC-funded project here).
A new paper, first author Emeline Favreau, has been highlighted in the January edition of journal Genome Biology and Evolution. Congratulations to Emeline, Chris Wyatt and Katie Geist on their momentous study on the molecular basis of sociality across bees and wasps. Read the highlight here, or find the paper itself here.
Social insects perform vital ecosystem services; for example, bees are important pollinators, ants disperse seeds and termites toil the soil. The role of wasps in ecosystems is less well understood, and this is one of the reasons why people generally dislike wasps. We lack estimates of the ecological and economic value of wasps to ecosystems […]
A trade-mark of sociality is the evolution of specialist task-performers, who show life-time commitment to a specific role. Social insects are great study organisms for understanding how and why this happens. The prime example is the highly eusocial species, the honeybee, where each individual larvae retains the ability to develop as a queen or a worker […]
Social insects (bees, wasps, ants and termites) are great models for addressing this: a single genome can give rise to remarkably different phenotypes, in the form of queen and worker castes. Such differences are underlain by differential expression of shared genes. We are exploring the molecular basis of social castes in a range of eusocial […]