Insect Regulatory Genomics

Insects are the most diverse and ecologically important group of animals in the animal kingdom, with more than a million species described to date. Whole-genome sequencing, which has revolutionized many areas of biological research, carries significant potential for achieving a deeper understanding of insect development, physiology, and evolution and for facilitating new biotechnological advances in insect management and biocontrol. Comprehensive genome annotation, including not only genes but also regulatory regions, is necessary for realizing the full benefits of this sequencing. However, regulatory element discovery in non-model organisms remains a major challenge as most regulatory sequences have diverged past the point of recognition by standard sequence alignment methods, even for relatively closely related species such as flies and mosquitoes. We review here some of the advances made in insect regulatory genomics and the methods and resources available for identifying regulatory elements in well-studied model insects such as Drosophila. We discuss recent efforts to extend these approaches to discovering regulatory elements in evolutionarily diverged non-model species and potential applications of the resulting regulatory data.