Chewing through challenges: Exploring the evolutionary pathways to wood-feeding in insects.

Decaying wood, while an abundant and stable resource, presents considerable nutritional challenges due to its structural rigidity, chemical recalcitrance, and low nitrogen content. Despite these challenges, certain insect lineages have successfully evolved saproxylophagy (consuming and deriving sustenance from decaying wood), impacting nutrient recycling in ecosystems and carbon sequestration dynamics. This study explores the uneven phylogenetic distribution of saproxylophagy across insects and delves into the evolutionary origins of this trait in disparate insect orders.

Wood fibers are a crucial microhabitat for cellulose- and xylan- degrading bacteria in the hindgut of the wood-feeding beetle .

Introduction: Wood digestion in insects relies on the maintenance of a mosaic of numerous microhabitats, each colonized by distinct microbiomes. Understanding the division of digestive labor between these microhabitats- is central to understanding the physiology and evolution of symbiotic wood digestion. A microhabitat that has emerged to be of direct relevance to the process of lignocellulose digestion is the surface of ingested plant material.

The evolution and genomic basis of beetle diversity.

The order Coleoptera (beetles) is arguably the most speciose group of animals, but the evolutionary history of beetles, including the impacts of plant feeding (herbivory) on beetle diversification, remain poorly understood. We inferred the phylogeny of beetles using 4,818 genes for 146 species, estimated timing and rates of beetle diversification using 89 genes for 521 species representing all major lineages and traced the evolution of beetle genes enabling symbiont-independent digestion of lignocellulose using 154 genomes or transcriptomes. Phylogenomic analyses of these uniquely comprehensive datasets resolved previously controversial beetle relationships, dated the origin of Coleoptera to the Carboniferous, and supported the codiversification of beetles and angiosperms.

, a New Genus of Bess Beetle (Coleoptera, Passalidae) from a Montane Subtropical Forest in Central Mexico, with a Review of the Taxonomic Significance of the Mesofrontal Structure in Proculini.

Mexico has the third highest diversity of passalid beetles in the World. Here we describe , a new monotypic genus, potentially endemic to the mountains of central Mexico. The new genus is diagnosed by a new configuration of characters from the mesofrontal structure (MFS) in addition to other characters.

Phylogeny of the genus Boucher (Coleoptera, Passalidae, Proculini): Taxonomic and evolutionary implications with descriptions of three new species.

Boucher (Coleoptera: Passalidae) is an endemic genus from the temperate sierras of Mexico and includes six narrowly distributed species. species have been assigned to several genera of Passalidae throughout history, and a phylogenetic approach is necessary to understand species delimitation and interspecific relationships. This study reconstructed the molecular phylogeny of six morphotypes using parsimony and Bayesian analysis of DNA sequence data from the ribosomal nuclear gene region 28S and the mitochondrial gene regions 12S and cytochrome oxidase I (COI) in addition to morphological characters.