old lab, new name

Second, we wanted to know what the SPB genome can tell us about its tree-killing habit, given that SPB is the most destructive forest pest in the southeastern US with outbreaks that have greatly impacted loblolly pine commercial and natural forests.
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First, Dendroctonus shows extreme karyotypic variation and multiple lineages that evolved neo-XY chromosomes.
Despite this variation, we confirmed that the core coleopteran Stevens elements are conserved in SPB, and we identified the bona fide SPB X chromosome.

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Happy to see our work on the assembly and genome analysis of the southern pine beetle (SPB) Dendroctonus frontalis out in RS Open Science!

So why SPB, and what did we learn? (and bonus surprise at the end..)

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

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