Insects evolution

There is good reason to be optimistic about the potential future usefulness of such exogenous compounds as a continuing source of potential lead compounds. With many thousands of years of trial-and-error by evolution on her side. Mother Nature is a vastly superior experimentalist to any mere human organic chemist. Insect evolution has permitted the biosynthesis of anticoagulant molecules to ensure that a bite will provide a... 

Both nuclear receptors EcR and USP that form the functional receptor for ecdysone seem to have evolved in a concerted way during insect evolution. The evolutionary conserved divergences in the protein sequences of arthropod USPs-RXRs and EcRs are... 

Dethier, V. G. (1954) Evolution of feeding preferences in phytophagous insects. Evolution, 8, 33-54. 

Plants and insects colonized dry land at the same time. B. Misof et al. Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. 2014. Science 346(6210), p. 763. DOI 10.1126/science.l257570. 

Transferrin iron uptake via receptor-mediated endocytosis has clearly appeared fairly late in evolution, when we consider that the bilobal iron-binding protein is found only as far back as insects . As we have seen in the preceding chapters, iron-uptake mechanisms involving the synthesis of more or less specific siderophores have evolved together with strategies implying the solubilization of insoluble ferric iron by the combined effects of pH and reduction, and even the development of receptor proteins capable of taking up transferrin-, lactoferrin- or haem-bound iron from specific hosts. 

Resistance to antibiotics has a close parallel that has become equally familiar over the past fifty years. On repeated exposure, agricultural pests typically become tolerant of a pesticide that is used to control them. Farmers know that the amount of pesticide required to achieve control increases from year to year. Insect pests develop resistance through evolution in the same way that bacteria do. One or two serious pests are now essentially immune to all available pesticides, and many others are moving in that direction. 

This kind of impact is complicated by the possible influence of these chemicals on the process of evolution itself When a chemical comes into widespread use, especially an insecticide, it is only a matter of time before the target insects develop resistance. That is, those individual insects with natural resistance (as a result of natural variation and mutation) survive successive assaults of a given chemical and reproduce broods with similar immunity, which come to be common in the whole population. In a short period of time (because insects reproduce quickly), the species becomes resistant altogether (Table 4.6). ... 

Coevolution is defined as reciprocal stepwise adaptations between at least two species (Ehrlich and Raven, 1964). Coevolution without the criterion of reciprocity is indistinguishable from evolution and hence a useless concept (Lindroth, 1988). Consider the following scenario. A plant develops effective antiherbivore defenses. In response, a herbivore counteradapts to circumvent these defenses and is at a competitive advantage over other herbivores. The plant, in turn, responds to this breach of its defenses. In insects, such pairwise reciprocal evolution can take the form of a chemical arms race (Dawkins and Krebs, 1979). Coevolution differs from evolution by being narrower, with fewer participants, perhaps even only two species or two populations. In reality, in most ecosystems, many species prey on many other species. Therefore, we can at best speak of diffuse coevolution, with a number of participants that exert diluted selection pressures. 

I will extend this argument to encompass the diversification of such systems in lineages of plants in an effort to correlate enzyme-mediated glycoside toxicity with the evolution of host plant specificity and the coevolution of plants and insects. 

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