A great diversity of viruses have co-occured with insect hosts, taking advances of the cellular machinery of the host, including splicing. Our recent study on co-expressed viruses from host transcriptomes revealed these viral transcripts not only can infer the diversity of insect viruses, but also splicing codes of the hosts. The finding provides a new approach to understanding how RNA mechanisms work in insects, especially for non-model taxa, which is the majority of the group. Zhou, C., S. Liu, W. Song, S. Luo, G. Meng, C. Yang, H. Yang, J. Ma, L. Wang, S. Gao, J. Wang, H. Yang, Y. Zhao*, H. Wang*, and X. Zhou*. 2018. Characterization of viral RNA splicing using whole-transcriptome dataset
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Mitochondrion is the major energy production organelle in eukaryotes, generating more than 70% of the ATPs through the OXPHOS pathway, which consists of proteins encoded by both mitochondrial and nuclear genes. We investigated nucleotide substitution rates and selective pressures for OXPHOS genes of the 4 major insect orders. The results show that hymenopterans have the highest substation rates in mitochondrial OXPHOS genes and substantially elevated rates in their nuclear OXPHOS genes. Although positive selection has been identified in some of these nuclear OXPHOS genes, other evolutionary drivers may also play important roles in the fast molecular evolution pattern in hymenopterans. Li, Y.