The blowfly, Aldrichina grahami (Diptera: Calliphoridae), is a well-known forensically important insect. Basic data related to A. grahami have been well documented; but despite the pivotal role of gut microbes in various facets of insect biology, little is known about its gut microbiome. To investigate the gut bacterial community of A. grahami and explore its stability, diet and developmental stage were selected as the two variables. Larvae were reared on bovine liver, swine manure, and chicken manure, and high-throughput sequencing of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd instar larvae and the newly emerged adults was performed. According to our results, the alpha diversity of the gut bacterial community did not significantly vary among different diets and developmental stages. Principal coordinate analysis revealed that the gut microbiome of A. grahami clustered together among different diets and developmental stages. The main phyla in the gut microbial community of A. grahami were Firmicutes and Proteobacteria, and the dominant genera were Vagococcus, Providencia, Lactobacillus, and Morganella. These findings characterized the gut microbiome of A. grahami and demonstrated that the gut bacterial community is fairly stable. The dominant genera Vagococcus, Providencia, Lactobacillus, and Morganella have the potential to serve as core microbiomes within the gut microbial community of A. grahami.

Aphids exhibit wing polyphenism. Winged and wingless aphid morphs are produced by parthenogenesis depending on population density and host plant quality. Recent studies showed that microRNAs in alate and apterous individuals have differential expression and are involved in wing dimorphism of Acyrthosiphon pisum. From which miR-92a-1-p5 can target the mRNA of flight muscle gene flightin in vitro, but what effect they have on wing development of aphid is unclear. Here with the nanocarrier-delivered RNA interference (RNAi) method, flightin gene was knocked down in winged nymphs of A. pisum. Results showed that the majority (63.33%) of adults had malformed wings, the shape of dorsal longitudinal muscle (DLM) was deformed severely, the dorsoventral flight muscle (DVM) became wider and looser in aphids with flightin reduction compared with the negative control. Overexpression of miR-92a-1-p5 caused decreased expression of flightin and malformed wings of aphids, with a mutant ratio of 62.50%. Morphological analysis of flight musculature showed the consistent result as that with flightin knockdown. These results suggest that flightin is essential for flight musculature formation and wing extension in A. pisum, which can be modulated by miR-92a-1-p5.

The species of the genus Cerapanorpa Gao, Ma & Hua, 2016 (Mecoptera: Panorpidae) are characterized mainly by the presence of a finger-like anal horn on tergum VI of males and are distributed in the Oriental and eastern Palearctic regions. Herein, we investigated the pachytene banding patterns and reconstructed the Bayesian time-calibrated tree of some species of Cerapanorpa. All species examined display achiasmate meiosis and the same meiformula 2n = 42 + X0, reconfirming the monophyly of Cerapanorpa. The great variations in the size and number of heterochromatic bands suggest that they are reliable traits for species delimitation in Cerapanorpa. The existence of natural C-banding polymorphism indicates that chromosomal rearrangements likely have contributed to the diversification of chromosomal bands in Cerapanorpa. The closely related species of Cerapanorpa are reconfirmed to be evolutionarily independent entities by cytogenetic and molecular data. The divergence time estimated from the BEAST analysis shows that Cerapanorpa likely originated in the period from the Rupelian (30.7 Ma) to the Burdigalian (19.9 Ma), and most diversification occurred from the Burdigalian to the Piacenzian (17.4–2.8 Ma) in the Neogene. Our data suggest that chromosome rearrangements likely play a significant role in the speciation of Cerapanorpa.