Tackling diversity: new technologies to explore insect function

昆虫主宰着我们的世界，昆虫种类的数量相当于所有其他生物的总和。对我们的社会既有有益的影响(如授粉)，也有有害的影响(如疟疾、登革热)，更好地了解昆虫是如何工作的显然很重要。但面对非同寻常的生物多样性(可能有数千万物种)，我们从哪里开始呢？几年来，我们的实验室已经开发出了这样一个分析框架；虽然我们的大部分工作是在著名的果蝇模型(一种小型果蝇)上进行的，但我们理性地选择了其他代表主要昆虫目的物种，从而提供了一种对昆虫生物多样性进行采样的方法。测序方面的新进展使人们有可能找出哪些基因在单个细胞中使用(表达)，所以现在是第一次找出昆虫组织--在我们的例子中是昆虫的肾脏--真正发挥功能的绝佳时机。这种方法的好处将被感受到，不仅在我们对这种组织及其许多角色的基本理解中，而且在生物医学中，因为昆虫肾脏忠实地模拟了几种人类肾脏疾病；而且在昆虫控制方面，它可能选择性地破坏有害但无益的昆虫的功能，从而产生更有选择性的昆虫控制措施。

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.