No Excess: Antarctic Midge's Genome Is Smallest Insect's To Date
Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - 13:32
in Biology & Nature
Scientists have sequenced the genome of Belgica antarctica, the Antarctic midge – the smallest in insects described to-date – and believe it can explained by the midge's adaptation to its deep-freeze extreme living environment. The midge is a small, wingless fly that spends most of its two-year larval stage frozen in the Antarctic ice. Upon adulthood, the insects spend seven to 10 days mating and laying eggs, and then they die. Its genome contains only 99 million base pairs of nucleotides, making it smaller than other tiny reported genomes for the body louse (105 million base pairs) and the winged parasite Strepsiptera (108 million base pairs), as well as the genomes of three other members of the midge family. read more