Tackling diversity: new technologies to explore insect function

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Insects dominate our world, with as many insect species as all other living organisms combined. With both beneficial (e.g. pollination) and harmful (e.g. malaria, dengue) impacts on our society, it is clearly important to better understand how insects work. But in the face of extraordinary biodiversity (perhaps tens of millions of species), where do we begin? Over several years, our lab has developed a framework for such analysis; while much of our work is in the famous model Drosophila (a small fruit fly), we have rationally selected other species that are representative of the major insect Orders, and so provide a way of sampling insect biodiversity. New advances in sequencing have made it possible to find out which genes are being used (expressed) in individual cells, so the time is now perfect to find out for the first time how insect tissues - in our case, the insect's 'kidney' - truly function. The benefits of this approach will be felt, not just in our fundamental understanding of this tissue and its many roles, but in biomedicine, as the insect kidney faithfully models several human renal diseases; but also in insect control, where it may be possible to selectively knock down the function of harmful but not beneficial insects, so producing more selective insect control measures.