Astrid Groot

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics

The evolution of sexual communication is critically important in the diversity of arthropods, which are declining at a fast pace worldwide. Their environments are rapidly changing, with increasing chemical, acoustic, and light pollution. To predict how arthropod species will respond to changing climates, habitats, and communities, we need to unders...

Insects rely on olfaction to guide a wide range of adaptive behaviors, including mate and food localization, mate choice, oviposition site selection, kin recognition, and predator avoidance.1 In nocturnal insects, such as moths2 and cockroaches,3 mate finding is stimulated predominantly by long-range species-specific sex pheromones, typically emitt...

The fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda (JE Smith, 1797), is a serious pest of several crops, particularly maize and other cereals. It has long been known as a pest in the Americas and has invaded most of Africa and parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Australia in the last six years. Its new status as an invasive species causing serious dama...

Chemical communication is ubiquitous in nature and chemical signals convey species-specific messages. Despite their specificity, chemical signals may not be limited to only one function. Identifying alternative functions of chemical signals is key to understanding how chemical communication systems evolve. Here, we explored alternative functions of...

Automated genome annotation is essential for extracting biological information from sequence data. The identification and annotation of tRNA genes is frequently performed by the software package tRNAscan-SE, the output of which is listed for selected genomes in the Genomic tRNA database (GtRNAdb). Here, we highlight a pervasive error in prokaryotic...

Evolution has traditionally been a historical and descriptive science, and predicting future evolutionary processes has long been considered impossible. However, evolutionary predictions are increasingly being developed and used in medicine, agriculture, biotechnology and conservation biology. Evolutionary predictions may be used for different purp...

Background Under strong sexual selection, certain species evolve distinct intrasexual, alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs). In many cases, ARTs can be viewed as environmentally-cued threshold traits, such that ARTs coexist if their relative fitness alternates over the environmental cue gradient. Surprisingly, the chemical ecology of ARTs has be...

Egg parasitoids of herbivorous insects use an interplay of short- and long-range chemical cues emitted by hosts and host plants to find eggs to parasitize. Volatile compounds that attract egg parasitoids can be identified via behavioral assays and used to manipulate parasitoid behavior in the field for biological control of herbivorous pests. Howev...

The fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae), is a well-known agricultural pest in its native range, North and South America, and has become a major invasive pest around the globe in the past decade. In this review, we provide an overview to update what is known about S. frugiperda in its native geographic ranges. This is...

The greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella (L.) (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), has gathered widespread interest in the biomedical research community as an alternative non‐mammalian model to study bacterial and fungal infections in humans. Nevertheless, most laboratories rely on commercial breeding companies that grow these larvae in bulk. Variation in re...

Automated genome annotation is an essential tool for extracting biological information from sequence data. The identification and annotation of tRNA genes is frequently performed by the software package tRNAscan-SE, the output of which is listed – for selected genomes – in the Genomic tRNA database (GtRNAdb). Given the central role of tRNA in molec...

The predictability of evolution is expected to depend on the relative contribution of deterministic and stochastic processes. This ratio is modulated by effective population size. Smaller effective populations harbor less genetic diversity and stochastic processes are generally expected to play a larger role, leading to less repeatable evolutionary...

Sexual signals are important in speciation, but understanding their evolution is complex as these signals are often composed of multiple, genetically interdependent components. To understand how signals evolve, we thus need to consider selection responses in multiple components and account for the genetic correlations among components. One intrigui...

Sexual signals are important in speciation, but understanding their evolution is complex as these signals are often composed of multiple, genetically interdependent components. To understand how signals evolve, we thus need to consider selection responses in multiple components and account for the genetic correlations among components. One intrigui...

Sexual selection in animals has been mostly studied in species in which males are signalers and females are choosers. However, in many species, females are (also) signalers. In species with non‐signaling females, virgin females are hypothesized to be less choosy than mated females, as virgins must mate to realize fitness and the number of available...

Moth sex pheromones are a classical model for studying sexual selection. Females produce a species-specific pheromone blend that attracts males. Revealing the enzymes involved in the interspecific variation in blend composition is key for understanding the evolution of these sexual communication systems. The nature of the enzymes involved in the va...

The predictability of evolution is expected to depend on the relative contribution of deterministic and stochastic processes. This ratio is modulated by effective population size. Smaller effective populations harbor less genetic diversity and stochastic processes are generally expected to play a larger role, leading to less repeatable evolutionary...

Sex pheromones in many insect species are important species-recognition signals that attract conspecifics and inhibit attraction between heterospecifics; therefore, sex pheromones have predominantly been considered to evolve due to interactions between species. Recent research, however, is uncovering roles for these signals in mate choice, and that...

The aim of this study was to validate a workflow that allows structural identification of plant volatiles that induce a behavioral response in insects. Due to the complexity of plant volatile emissions and the low levels at which these bioactive components tend to occur, gas chromatography-electroantennography (GC-EAD) was applied as the prime diff...

Sexual signals are important in speciation, but understanding their evolution is complex as these signals are often composed of multiple, genetically interdependent components. To understand how signals evolve, we thus need to consider selection responses in multiple components and account for the genetic correlations among components. One intrigui...

Sexual signal evolution is shaped by whether only one or both sexes execute mate choice. When mate choice by both sexes is considered, the same signalling modality is generally inferred for males and females. In the noctuid moth Chloridea (Heliothis) virescens (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), both sexes may be signallers and responders, as both emit a sex...

Evolution has traditionally been a historical field of study and predicting evolution has long been considered challenging or even impossible. However, evolutionary predictions are increasingly being made and used in many situations in medicine, agriculture, biotechnology and conservation biology. Because every field uses their own language and mak...

Parasites can play an important role in host sexual selection. According to the ‘Hamilton & Zuk hypothesis’, females acquire benefits from choosing parasite-free or parasite-resistant males based on their secondary sexual traits (e.g. colourful plumage) as indicators of heritable parasite resistance. However, females may also gain benefits by avoid...

Background Under strong sexual selection, certain species evolve distinct intrasexual, alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs). In many cases, ARTs can be viewed as environmentally cued threshold traits, such that ARTs coexist if their relative fitness alternates over the environmental cue gradient. Surprisingly, the chemical ecology of ARTs has be...

Background Under strong sexual selection, certain species evolve distinct intrasexual, alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs). In many cases, ARTs can be viewed as environmentally-cued threshold traits, such that ARTs coexist if their relative fitness alternates over the environmental cue gradient. Surprisingly, the chemical ecology of ARTs has be...

If sexual signals are costly, covariance between signal expression and fitness is expected. Signal–fitness covariance is important, because it can contribute to the maintenance of genetic variation in signals that are under natural or sexual selection. Chemical signals, such as female sex pheromones in moths, have traditionally been assumed to be s...

Sex pheromones in many insect species are important species-recognition signals that attract conspecifics and inhibit attraction between heterospecifics; therefore, sex pheromones have predominantly been considered to evolve due to interactions between species. Recent research, however, is uncovering roles for these signals in mate choice, and that...

The sex pheromone system of ~160,000 moth species acts as a powerful form of assortative mating whereby females attract conspecific males with a species-specific blend of volatile compounds. Understanding how female pheromone production and male preference coevolve to produce this diversity requires knowledge of the genes underlying change in both...

If sexual signals are costly to produce or maintain, covariance between signal expression and fitness is expected. This signal-fitness covariance is important evolutionarily, because it can contribute to the maintenance of genetic variation in signal traits, despite selection from mate preferences. Chemical signals, such as moth sex pheromones, hav...

This PPT sumarized the structure of FAW strains and the two hibrids in Togo

Background: Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have studied sexual selection driving differences in appearance and behaviour between males and females. An unchallenged paradigm in such studies is that one sex (usually the male) signals its quality as a mate to the other sex (usually the female), who is choosy in accepting a partner. Here,...

Background Geographic variation in male response to sex pheromone lures has been studied in the field in a number of moth species. However, only a few studies have investigated geographic variation in female calling and sex pheromone under field conditions. For an effective field implementation of sex pheromone lures, it is essential to know the lo...

DNA methylation is an important epigenetic modification that is prone to stochastic variation and is responsive to environmental factors. Yet changes in DNA methylation could persist across generations and thus play an important role in evolution. In this study, we used methylation-sensitive amplified fragment length polymorphisms (MS-AFLP) to eval...

Background: Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have studied sexual selection driving differences in appearance and behaviour between males and females. An unchallenged paradigm in such studies is that one sex (usually the male) signals its quality as a mate to the other sex (usually the female), who is choosy in accepting a partner. Here, w...

Many parasites are constrained to only one or a few hosts, showing host specificity. It remains unclear why some parasites are specialists and other parasites are generalists. The parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE) is a neogregarine protozoan thought to be restricted to monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus (Nymphaliae) and D. gilippus. Rece...

Transcriptome quality control is an important step in RNA‐Seq experiments. However, the quality of de novo assembled transcriptomes is difficult to assess, due to the lack of reference genome to compare the assembly to. We developed a method to assess and improve the quality of de novo assembled transcriptomes by focusing on the removal of chimeric...

Background Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have studied sexual selection driving differences in appearance and behaviour between males and females. An unchallenged paradigm in such studies is that one sex (usually the male) signals its quality as a mate to the other sex (usually the female), who is choosy in accepting a partner. Here, we...

Background:Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have studied sexual selection driving differences in appearance and behaviour between males and females. An unchallenged paradigm in such studies is that one sex (usually the male) signals its quality as a mate to the other sex (usually the female), who is choosy in accepting a partner. Here, we...

In an ideal world, funding agencies could identify the best scientists and projects and provide them with the resources to undertake these projects. Most scientists would agree that in practice, how funding for scientific research is allocated is far from ideal and likely compromises research quality. We, nine evolutionary biologists from different...

To understand how variation in sexual communication systems evolves, the genetic architecture underlying sexual signals and responses needs to be identified. Especially in animals where mating signals are important for mate recognition, and signals and responses are governed by independently assorting genes, it is difficult to envision how signals...

Global climate is changing at a rapid pace and the pivotal question is if the rate and extent of species' responses to stressful events enable them to persist in a changing world. Although the consequences of rapid environmental changes on animal life-history traits are receiving considerable attention, our understanding of how temperature fluctuat...

Transcriptome quality control is an important step in RNA-seq experiments. However, the quality of de novo assembled transcriptomes is difficult to assess, due to the lack of reference genome to compare the assembly to. We developed a method to assess and improve the quality of de novo assembled transcriptomes by focusing on the removal of chimeric...

The chemicals emitted from the sex pheromone gland of individual Heliothis subflexa females were sampled using a short section of thick-film megabore fused silica capillary column, and the pheromone glands of the same females were extracted after the effluvia collection. Both samples were treated with a silylation reagent, and then subjected to gas...

Supporting data. Includes data in support of the figures. (XLSX)

Female-emitted volatile sex pheromones in most moths are composed of biosynthetically related blends of fatty acid derivatives, such as aldehydes, acetate esters and alcohols. In many moths, as in the noctuid Heliothis (Chloridea) virescens, the pheromone gland contains alcohols (e.g., (Z)-11-hexadecen-1-ol, hereafter Z11–16:OH) that may serve dual...

Circadian behavior is widely observed in insects; however, the mechanisms that drive its evolution remain a black box. While circadian activity rhythms are well characterized in adults within the order Lepidoptera (i.e., most butterfly species are day active, while most moths are night active), much less is known about daily activity and clock gene...

How sexual communication systems can evolve under stabilizing selection is still a paradox in evolutionary biology. In moths, females emit a species-specific sex pheromone, consisting of a blend of biochemically related components, to which males are attracted. Although males appear to exert strong stabilizing selection on female pheromone, these b...

Background Very little is known on how changes in circadian rhythms evolve. The noctuid moth Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) consists of two strains that exhibit allochronic differentiation in their mating time, which acts as a premating isolation barrier between the strains. We investigated the genetic basis of the strain-specific t...

Pomegranate (Punica granatum L.) orchards in the Middle East are typically composed of a mix of different cultivars in which variation in fruit infestation by carob moth Ectomyelois ceratoniae (Zeller) (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) has been observed. However, seasonal variation in infestation and adaptation of the carob moth to this cropping system have...