Tim Fallon, PhD

Tim Fallon, PhD

Oct 17, 2018

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Dear Firefly Genome Fans,

It's been 9 months 23 days since our last update to you, but rest assured, team bioluminescent beetles has been busy! We'd like to share our most exciting piece of recent news: completion of the scientific process and the publication of our final manuscript on the firefly genome(s) in the scientific journal eLife. eLife is an "open-access" journal, so we are glad to say you are able to read the manuscript its entirety. Plus, the eLife editors kindly wrote a layperson's "digest" summarizing our findings, which you can find at the top of the paper. Check it out!

https://elifesciences.org/articles/36495

At a brief 146 pages, our manuscript was a labour of love:

All 146 pages of the manuscript.

Fortunately, the key finding from our project that we told you about in our last update, namely that the special light-emitting enzymes (the luciferases) of fireflies and click-beetles evolved independently, did stand up to scientific scrutiny! So, we can now confidently say, our data support Charles Darwin's original hypothesis of independent evolution of bioluminescence within beetles, and makes it a fascinating case of parallel evolution.

We thank you for your support, from the beginning of the project, to its conclusion now. Does that mean were finished with the firefly genome? No! There is much more work to be done. Our 146 pages only scratch the surface of what fireflies and other bioluminescent beetles can teach us, and we'll keep working on it for the years to come. We hope you'll keep following along with our work, and invite you to stay in touch through our social media accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Finally, keep an eye out for these wondrous luminous critters in your neck of the woods.

Sincerely,

Team Bioluminescent Beetles

October 17th, 2018

The international Team Bioluminescent Beetles, with their favorite beetles.

P.S. If you want to learn more about fireflies, and even contribute sightings of fireflies or other glowy critters in your neighborhood that scientists could review & use to improve their research, take a look at the iNaturalist project, and the Fireflyers International society. Happy firefly-ing!

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About This Project

Fireflies! These silent fireworks on warm summer nights fill us with wonder. But so much about these fascinating critters remains shrouded in mystery. Our team of biologists has joined forces to sequence the genome of the Big Dipper Firefly, Photinus pyralis. This project has the potential to foster important advances in bioscience and medicine, will illuminate how a complex trait like light production evolves, and will help guide future efforts to conserve disappearing firefly populations.

Blast off!

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