What Recent News and Publications Are Featured on the Behmer Lab Website?

Updated

The Behmer Lab site (behmerlab.tamu.edu) lists news items from 2016–2017 covering conference talks, awards, and thesis defenses, alongside publications on nutrition and Bt toxin susceptibility, lipogenesis, and life-history trade-offs. The page also notes NSF-funded research and provides PDFs or links for some papers. The most recent dated entry is July 2017, so treat the news section as a historical record rather than a current feed.

Recent News and Announcements

The site's news section runs from November 2016 through July 2017:

  • July 2017 – Spence Behmer returned from giving a talk at Toulouse University and at SIP16 in Tours.
  • May 2017 – Behmer planned to visit Northwest A&F University, Huazhong Agricultural University, and the Institute of Zoology (Beijing).
  • March 2017 – Behmer gave a talk at the BExME workshop at Penn State University.
  • February 2017 – Behmer attended the Gordon Research Conference on Plant-Herbivore Interactions (Ventura, CA), serving as Vice Chair for the 2017 meeting and Chair for the 2019 meeting.
  • February 2017 – Richelle Marquess won the Department of Entomology MS Student of the Year Award.
  • January 2017 – The lab's paper on nutrition mediating insect susceptibility to Bt toxins became available in Scientific Reports; the lab describes it as "a very important paper."
  • December 2016 – A paper in the Journal of Insect Physiology related to NSF-funded life-history trade-off research, focused on lipogenesis across different nutritional environments.
  • November 2016 – A paper on nutrition as a neglected factor in insect herbivore susceptibility to Bt toxins appeared in Current Opinion in Insect Science.
  • October 2016 – Congratulations to Richelle Marquess on a successful thesis defense.

Publications Highlighted

The site features a full citation for the Bt toxin paper:

Deans, C.A., Behmer, S.T., Tessnow, A.E., Tamez-Guerra, P., Pusztai-Carey, M. and Sword, G.A. (2017) Nutrition affects insect susceptibility to Bt toxins. Scientific Reports 7, 39705. [pdf]

A "Key Publications and Features" section begins with:

Roeder, K.A. and Behmer, S.T. (2014) Lifetime consequences…

The excerpt cuts off there, so the full list of key publications isn't visible in the available page evidence.

What the Lab Studies

The news and publications sit within three broadly defined research areas:

  1. Physiological ecology
  2. Insect sterol (cholesterol) biology
  3. Mechanisms of learning

The lab takes a "bottom-up" approach, using individual behavior as a tool to understand physiological and higher-level processes, and has recently begun using sequencing approaches. Study organisms include grasshoppers, caterpillars, ants, Drosophila, and insects with sucking mouthparts (hemipterans).

Practical Notes

  • PDFs and links: The site provides a PDF link for at least the Scientific Reports paper; other entries reference journals without visible links in the excerpt.
  • Recency: The latest news item is July 2017. If you need current activity, check the lab's contact page or the department site rather than relying on this news list.
  • Prospective students and postdocs: The page directs them to a separate section to learn more about the lab.