Preface: Insect signal transduction systems: Current knowledge and future directions

Abstract

AbstractThe papers in this special issue were originally derived from presentations at the International Congress of Entomology, Brisbane, Australia, in 2004. The corresponding authors appeared as speakers in a symposium entitled “Insect Signal Transduction Systems: Current Knowledge and Future Directions,” organized by Jozef Vanden Broeck (Leuven, Belgium) and David Stanley (Columbia, MO).Among the many exciting areas of insect science, it would be extremely difficult to exaggerate the importance of our growing knowledge on signal transduction systems. In recent years, the available molecular information has grown exponentially as a result of genome and EST (“expressed sequence tags”) sequencing projects. These projects already have an important impact on signal transduction research and provide novel insights in the evolution of genes coding for important components of signaling processes. Future challenges are to study the functional relationships between (this plethora of) genes, as well as the regulation of their expression. In addition to the more traditional insect physiology and the fruitful combination of Drosophila genetics and germline transformation technology, some very powerful methods have now become available for functional genomic analyses in the postgenomic research era.