Evolutionary Genomics of Nutrient-Mediated Immune and Metabolic Adaptations in Insects

Insects thrive in incredibly diverse and challenging environments. While we now know that nutrient-sensing pathways, immune-metabolic interactions, and epigenetic regulation are key to their survival, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how these systems have evolved across different insect lineages. This research aims to create an evolutionary framework to connect these molecular mechanisms to the genomic adaptations that allow insects to survive nutritional and pathogenic stress.The central problem this Research Topic tackles is the fragmented understanding of how key molecular mechanisms have collectively driven the evolutionary success of insects in challenging environments. While recent advances have separately illuminated the roles of nutrient-sensing pathways (TOR, Insulin, AMPK), immune-metabolic crosstalk, and epigenetic regulation in adaptation, a unified evolutionary-genomic framework is lacking. We lack a clear picture of how these systems co-evolve across different insect lineages to orchestrate survival under nutritional and pathogenic stress.To address this, we will synthesize findings from comparative genomics, functional genetics, and systems-biology. We aim to dissect the genomic signatures of natural selection on immune and metabolic genes, elucidate how epigenetic landscapes modulate these traits in response to diet, and define the evolutionary rules of immune-metabolic integration. By doing so, this topic will establish a cohesive paradigm for how nutrient-mediated adaptations have sculpted insect genomes, revealing fundamental principles of animal evolution.Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:• Comparative genomics of insect lineages with contrasting diets: e.g., nutrient-rich vs nutrient-poor niches.• Molecular evolution of genes regulating nutrient-sensing pathways (e.g., TOR, AMPK, insulin signalling) in insects.• Evolution of immune-metabolic cross-talk: how insect immune genes co-evolve with nutrient-metabolism genes.• Epigenetic regulation of stress adaptation (e.g., starvation, infection) in insects: how epigenetic modifications have evolved across taxa.• Phylogenomic analyses identifying convergent evolution of nutrient/immunity adaptation in insect clades. Topic editors: Ahmed A. A. Aioub, Ahmed S. Hashem Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/76029/evolutionary-genomics-of-nutrient-mediated-immune-and-metabolic-adaptations-in-insects