Pacific beetle-mimic cockroaches may look much like other cockroaches, but they do something no other cockroach does: they give birth to live young. Instead of laying eggs, Diploptera punctata females house their young inside a uterus-like brood sac, and secrete a special “milk” from its walls for nourishment until the offspring emerge as fully-formed cockroaches.
Such viviparity has evolved at least 140 times in animals, including dozens of independent appearances in insects. However, most of what is known about the evolution of this form of reproduction comes from vertebrates. In publishing the first genome sequence for D. punctata, made available February 4 as a bioRxiv preprint, an international team of researchers aims to change that and help broaden the scientific understanding of viviparity.
Project collaborators sequenced and assembled the genome using a combination of PacBio long reads and Illumina short reads. The resulting 3.13 Gb assembly had few gaps and ...
