A group of Assistant Professor Hiroki Goto of the Graduate School of Bioagricultural Sciences, Nagoya University demonstrated how beetle horns appear in less than two hours when they turn from larvae to pupae.
In many insects, the morphological change in each molt is small during the larval stage, but when molting from the larva to the pupa (or from the larva to the adult), the molting changes greatly. Achieve.The protruding "horns" of the beetle are a typical example, and large horns suddenly appear when the larva turns into a pupa.This is because the larva has a folded "horn primordium (precursor of the horn)" in its head.The horny primordium of the beetle swells and expands when body fluid is sent during pupation, forming an elongated "horn" with a branched structure at the tip, but little is known about the principle and mechanism of this generation.
So the group proved that a horn primordium with a wrinkled bag-like structure could be reconstructed in a computer and then inflated by calculation to make a proper horn.In other words, the three-dimensional structure information of the perfect angle already exists in the wrinkle structure of the precursor.The simulation shows that the beetle has a three-dimensional structure of horns in a "small folded state" during the larval stage, and takes two steps of "deploying at once" at the time of molting to make horns. Was done.
This achievement was published in the British online scientific journal Scientific Reports on October 2017, 10.
Paper information:[Scientific Reports] Complex furrows in a 2D epithelial sheet code the 3D structure of a beetle horn
