Fireflies and their luminous courtships have inspired centuries of scientific study. Today firefly luciferase is widely used in biotechnology, but the evolutionary origin of bioluminescence within beetles remains unclear. To shed light on this long-standing question, we sequenced the genomes of two ...
Aquatic insects are well-adapted to freshwater environments, but metabolic mechanisms of such adaptations, particularly to primary environmental factors (e.g., hypoxia, water pressure, dark light and abundant microbes), are poorly known. Most firefly species (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) are terrestri...
Firefly larvae are highly specialized predators of snails, which utilize midgut secretions to incapacitate and pre-digest their much larger prey. With the current analysis we aim to shed light on the composition of the midgut secretion of these larvae utilizing a proteo-transcriptomic approach.
