Expanding the Medfly Virome: Viral Diversity, Prevalence, and sRNA Profiling in Mass-Reared and Field-Derived Medflies.

The Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly), , is an agricultural pest of a wide range of fruits. The advent of high-throughput sequencing has boosted the discovery of RNA viruses infecting insects. In this article, we aim to characterize the RNA virome and viral sRNA profile of medfly.

Baculovirus infection affects caterpillar chemoperception.

Baculoviruses are double-stranded DNA entomopathogenic viruses that infect predominantly insects of the order Lepidoptera. Research in the last decade has started to disentangle the mechanisms underlying the insect-virus interaction, particularly focusing on the effects of the baculovirus infection in the host's physiology. Among crucial physiological functions, olfaction has a key role in reproductive tasks, food source detection and enemy avoidance.

Structural and transcriptional evidence of mechanotransduction in the Drosophila suzukii ovipositor.

Drosophila suzukii is an invasive pest that prefers to lay eggs in ripening fruits, whereas most closely related Drosophila species exclusively use rotten fruit as oviposition site. This behaviour is allowed by an enlarged and serrated ovipositor that can pierce intact fruit skin, and by multiple contact sensory systems (mechanosensation and taste) that detect the optimal egg-laying substrates. Here, we tested the hypothesis that bristles present in the D.

Cytokinin transfer by a free-living mirid to recapitulates a strategy of endophytic insects.

Endophytic insects provide the textbook examples of herbivores that manipulate their host plant's physiology, putatively altering source/sink relationships by transferring cytokinins (CK) to create 'green islands' that increase the nutritional value of infested tissues. However, unambiguous demonstrations of CK transfer are lacking. Here we show that feeding by the free-living herbivore on is characterized by stable nutrient levels, increased CK levels and alterations in CK-related transcript levels in attacked leaves, in striking similarity to endophytic insects.