The Zhou lab

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 gro

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 OX