Insects cause untold damages to agricultural and horticultural crops every year, despite our best efforts to control them with pesticides and management practices. And, because plants are the base of terrestrial food chains, damage caused by insects to plants has the potential to have ripple effects on other species. Agricultural and greenhouse pests, in particular, cause large economic losses every year. The genetic basis of how these pests thrive, or fail to thrive, on their hosts plants remains poorly understood. We are in the unique position of having a large sample of genomic sequence data for an insect amidst a population outbreak, when there numbers were growing exponentially. The research is an integrative mixture of plant biology, genetics and genomics, population genetics, and bioinformatics.

 

The essence of the project is for student(s) to align next generation sequence data to a reference genome for the pest, identify polymorphic sites in the population, and then link allele frequency differences in the insects with phenotypic differences in their host plants.