Our own model organism!

Thanks to a small award from the Royal Society, we are able to realise our ambition to make Tenebrio molitor, the humble meal worm, the first model organism for our Innovation labs. This is just a short post to whet your appetite, but we shall begin this week in the Y10 labs, to generate materials, begin to document the Biology, the Biochemistry and Molecular Biological characteristics of the insect at various stages of its life cycle. The Greenland Biodesign team have been maintaining our "crop" of larvae and as of last week we have taken delivery of our first three beetles, which I would like to call John, Paul and George: Ringo hasn't arrived yet, but then he was a latecomer to the Band! More on this as we get underway in the labs this coming week, when we make our first stab at curating the genome data already available for T.molitor.