Vet World   Vol.11   August-2018  Article-4

Red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum): From population genetics to functional genomics

Background and Aim: Tribolium castaneum is a small and low maintenance beetle that has emerged as a most suitable insect model for studying developmental biology and functional genetic analysis. Diverse population genetic studies have been conducted using Tribolium as the principal model to establish basic facts and principles of inbreeding experiments and response to the selection and other quantitative genetics fundamentals. The advanced molecular genetic studies presently focused on the use of Tribolium as a typical invertebrate model for higher diploid eukaryotes. After a whole genome sequencing of Tribolium, many areas of functional genomics were unraveled, which enabled the use of it in many technical approaches of genomics. The present text reviews the use of Tribolium in techniques such as RNAi, transgenic studies, immune priming, immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, gene sequencing for characterization of microRNAs, and gene editing using engineered endonuclease. In contrast to Drosophila, the T. castaneum holds a robust systemic RNAi response, which makes it an excellent model for comparative functional genetic studies.

Keywords: functional genomics, hox gene, insertional mutagenesis, RNAi, Tribolium.

How to cite this article: Kumar H, Panigrahi M, Chhotaray S, Bhanuprakash V, Shandilya R, Sonwane A, Bhushan B (2018) Red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum): From population genetics to functional genomics, Veterinary World, 11(8): 1043-1046.

Received: 17-03-2018  Accepted: 25-06-2018     Published online: 02-08-2018

Corresponding author: Manjit Panigrahi   E-mail: manjit707@gmail.com

DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2018.1043-1046

Copyright: Kumar, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.