Pick Lab's paper, "Segmentation gene expression and function in Vanessa cardui, an emerging model for Lepidoptera", published this month in Development, gets spotlight!
Inspiration:
"Our work focuses on the set of genes required for segment formation in insects, beginning with the gene sets identified in Nobel-prize winning genetic screens in Drosophila." – Leslie Pick
Challenges:
"The most frustrating moments are the hours spent dissecting Vanessa embryos using forceps and sometimes a cat whisker* to remove the yolk for cleaner and better samples for the in situ hybridisation experiments." – Ximena Gutiérrez Ramos
Breakthroughs:
"It was incredible during initial eRNAi experiments... the first time I observed a knockdown phenotype in Vanessa cardui." – Ximena Gutiérrez Ramos
What's Next:
"To answer our questions about how the genes controlling segmentation have changed over the course of insect evolution, we are sampling many different species based upon well-established insect phylogeny. This has led us to work on something like ten different insect species over the years. Of all of these, butterflies are the most ‘charismatic’ species, most likely to draw interest from non-scientists... the work Ximena has done on establishing a long-maintained breeding colony in the lab, on using RNAi for functional experiments, on genomics in a previous paper (Gutiérrez Ramos and Pick, 2025) and on segmentation genes in this paper have put the painted lady butterfly high on our list for future experiments. " – Leslie Pick
See full article here: https://go.umd.edu/2ge7
