PhD Student
Advisor: Oleg Simakov

Department of Neurosciences and Developmental Biology, University of Vienna, Vienna, 1030, Austria

Abstract

Among the extraordinary diversity of insects, more than 98% belong to the Neoptera. Polyneoptera represents one of the earliest branching lineages within Neoptera and therefore occupies a pivotal position for understanding the early evolution and diversification of the Neoptera. Polyneoptera comprises 10 taxonomic orders, and recent large-scale phylogenetic studies have advanced our understanding of the relationships among these orders. However, the phylogenetic position of Zoraptera remains unresolved. Some previous studies have placed this order as the earliest diverging lineage of Polyneoptera, suggesting that resolving its phylogenetic position is essential for reconstructing the early evolutionary history of both Polyneoptera and Neoptera. Furthermore,Zoraptera also presents an evolutionary paradox in morphological evolution. Despite its small number of species compared with other orders and its limited variation in external morphology,Zoraptera exhibits remarkable diversity in genital morphology. In this study, we explores the phylogenetic position of Zoraptera within Polyneoptera through genome and transcriptomeanalysis of L. cacaoensis. We also aim to identify sex-determination-related gene sets underlying the contrast between long-term morphological conservatism and the diversification of genitalia through population genomic approaches. In this study, we generated the draft genome of L.cacaoensis using a Nanopore long reads. The total assembly size is 1.4 Gb and contig N50 is 47.6kb. The number of contigs is 53,478. The length of the largest contig is 440 kb. In parallel, wehave assembled transcriptomes from RNA-seq data across multiple Zoraptera species. These resources will be integrated with publicly available datasets from other Polyneoptera species for phylogenetic analyses. Furthermore, we plan to identify genomic regions and genes associated with sex determination through population genomics using short-read data for both male and female populations. In situ hybridization with RNA probes designed by referring to transcriptome data will be performed to characterize the spatial expression patterns of the genes to be identified in the pupulation analysis. Together, these approaches are expected to establish a novel genomic and transcriptomic resources for Zoraptera, providing new insights into genome structure, sex determination, and phylogenetic position within Polyneoptera. More broadly, this study is expected to advance a unifying framework that integrates insect phylogeny, genomic data, and phenotypic diversity into a coherent understanding.