The scientific community working in the field of insect pathology is experiencing an increasing academic and industrial interest in the discovery and development of new bioinsecticides as environmentally friendly pest control tools to be integrated, in combination or rotation, with chemicals in pest management programs. In this scientific context, market data report a significant growth of the ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs mediating post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression in eukaryotes. Addressing their role in regulation of physiological adaptations to environmental stress in insects, we selected the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum as a model. Beetles were fed with the bacterial entomopathogen Pseudomonas entomophila (to mimic natural infection), injec...

The larvae of scarab beetles, known as "white grubs" and belonging to the genera Phyllophaga and Anomala (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae), are regarded as soil-dwelling pests in Mexico. During a survey conducted to find pathogenic bacteria with the potential to control scarab larvae, a native Serratia sp. (strain Mor4.1) was isolated from a dead third-instar Phyllophaga blanchardi larva collected fro...

Bilateral animals are featured by an extremely compact mitochondrial (mt) genome with 37 genes on a single circular chromosome. To date, the complete mt genome has only been determined for four species of Liposcelis, a genus with economic importance, including L. entomophila, L. decolor, L. bostrychophila, and L. paeta. They belong to A, B, or D group of Liposcelis, respectively. Unlike most bi...

The rpoS gene of Serratia entomophila BC4B was cloned and used to create rpoS-mutant strain BC4BRS. Larvae of the New Zealand grass grub Costelytra zealandica infected with BC4BRS became amber colored but continued to feed, albeit to a lesser extent than infected larvae. Subsequently, we found that expression of the antifeeding gene anfA1 in trans was substantially reduced in BC4BRS relative to...

The p38 mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase signaling cassette has been implicated in stress and immunity in evolutionarily diverse species. In response to a wide variety of physical, chemical and biological stresses p38 kinases phosphorylate various substrates, transcription factors of the ATF family and other protein kinases, regulating cellular adaptation to stress. The Drosophila genome ...