Studies on new arthropod models such as the beetle Tribolium castaneum are shifting our knowledge of embryonic patterning and morphogenesis beyond the Drosophila paradigm. In contrast to Drosophila, Tribolium embryos exhibit the short-germ type of development and become enveloped by extensive extra-embryonic membranes, the amnion and serosa. The genetic basis of these processes has been the foc...

Balasubramanian, A., Jayas, D.S., Fernando, W.G.D., Li, G. and White, N.D.G. 2007. Sensitivity analysis of DNA fingerprinting technique for detecting insect fragments in wheat flour. Canadian Biosystems Engineering/Le génie des biosystèmes au Canada 49: 4.14.5. Tribolium castaneum (Herbst) and T. confusum (Jaquelin du Val) are the most commonly occurring insect species in flour mills and in dam...

Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling plays a major role in dorsoventral patterning in vertebrates and in Drosophila. Remarkably, in Tribolium, a beetle with an ancestral type of insect development, early BMP/dpp exhibits differential expression along the anteroposterior axis. However, the BMP/Dpp inhibitor Sog/chordin is expressed ventrally and establishes a dorsal domain of BMP/Dpp activ...

IN the fall of 1986 my colleague, Dick Beeman, sat in my office at Kansas State University and told me a fascinating story. He worked at what was then called the U. S. Grain Marketing Research Laboratory, a U. S. Department of Agriculture facility about a mile from campus. He was trained as an insect toxicologist, but to aid in his research he had become a self-taught geneticist using the red f...

Insect development has contributed significantly to our understanding of metazoan development. However, most information has been obtained by analyzing a single species, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Embryonic development of the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum differs fundamentally from that of Drosophila in aspects suchasshort-germdevelopment, embryonic legdevelopment, extensive ...

The red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, has been selected for whole genome shotgun sequencing in the next year. In this minireview, we discuss some of the genetic and genomic tools and biological properties of Tribolium that have established its importance as an organism for agricultural and biomedical research as well as for studies of development and evolution. A Tribolium genomic database...