Our team's bombardier beetle project is a finalist in a contest to sequence "the most interesting genome in the world." The winner will be determined by popular vote, and we'd love your support in pushing this extraordinary little beetle to the top. Here's the link to vote and to learn more about bombardiers and the contest: https://goo.gl/FXXOup (you can vote daily, up to 3x/day with different email addresses)
Bombardiers' extraordinary chemical weaponry was described and popularized by the late Tom Eisner. He and others (including members of our team) have documented how bombardiers use rapid-fire, precisely aimed explosive bursts of toxic compounds, delivered explosively at over 100C, to repel predators. Bombardiers represent just a few branches in a family tree (beetle family Carabidae, with >35,000 species) that represents one of the most remarkable diversifications of >defensive chemistry in the animal kingdom. Yet no genomic information is available for the entire clade. We're asking your help in establishing the bombardier beetle as a mini model for chemical ecology, evolutionary biology and other fields! -Aman Gill, postdoc, UC Berkeley 2017 SMRT Grant Finalist UNRAVELLING THE MYSTERIES OF THE EXPLOSIVE BOMBARDIER BEETLE Principal Investigators: Dr. Tanya Renner, San Diego State University Dr. Aman Gill, University of California, Berkeley Dr. Wendy Moore, University of Arizona Dr. Kipling Will, University of California, Berkeley Dr. Athula Attygalle, Stevens Institute of Technology
