Researchers reconstructed the insect family tree in hopes of gaining insight into how they developed; the findings could help us better understand insects' positive and negative influences on the environment.
Understanding insects is important because they affect our lives in ways from pollinating our crops to carrying diseases, Forschungs Museum Koenig reported.
"We can only start to understand the enormous species richness and ecological importance of insects with a reliable reconstruction of how they are related," said Bernhard Misof, Professor from Research Museum Alexander Koenig - Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity (ZFMK).
To make their findings researchers with the 1KITE project looked at 144 species to estimate the date and origin and relationship of all major insect groups based on a molecular dataset. They found the insects originated at the same time as early terrestrial plants about 480 million years ago. The new analysis suggests insects and plants made up the early ecosystem, and developed the ability to fly long before any other creature.
"Phylogeny forms the foundation for telling us the who?, what?, when?, and why? of life," said Karl Kjer, of Rutgers University. "Many previously intractable questions are now resolved, while many of the "revolutions" brought about by previous analyses of smaller molecular datasets have contained errors that are now being corrected."
The new findings also demonstrate the effectiveness of algorithms in handling "big data" such as the 1,000 insect transcriptomes (a set of RNA molecules) looked at in the study.
"For applied research, it will become possible to comparatively analyze metabolic pathways of different insects and use this information to more specifically target pest species or insects that affect our resources. The genomic data we studied (the transcriptome - all of the expressed genes) gives us a very detailed and precise view into the genetic constitution and evolution of the species studied."
