What Research Areas Does the Behmer Lab Focus On?

The Behmer Lab — formally the Insect Physiology & Behavior Research Group (IPBRG) at Texas A&M University, led by Spence Behmer — pursues three broadly defined research areas: physiological ecology, insect sterol (cholesterol) biology, and mechanisms of learning. The lab studies insect physiology and behavior together with their ecological and evolutionary bases, and it has more recently added sequencing approaches to better understand physiological processes.

The Lab's Approach

The group describes its method as "bottom-up," with an emphasis on using individual behavior as a tool to understand physiological and higher-level processes. In practice, that means starting from what a single insect does — feeding, choosing, learning — and working upward toward the physiology and ecology that explain it.

The Three Research Areas

1. Physiological ecology

How insect physiology interacts with environmental conditions, including nutrition and life-history trade-offs. Lab publications in this area include work on lipogenesis across different nutritional environments (Journal of Insect Physiology), tied to NSF-funded life-history trade-off research.

2. Insect sterol (cholesterol) biology

The biology of sterols in insects — a distinct area of the lab's work, and notable because insects generally cannot synthesize cholesterol themselves and must obtain sterols from their diet.

3. Mechanisms of learning

How learning works in insects at a mechanistic level, connecting behavior to underlying physiology.

Insects Used in the Research

The lab works across a range of insect groups rather than a single model organism:

• Grasshoppers
• Caterpillars
• Ants
• Drosophila
• Insects with sucking mouthparts (hemipterans)

A Sample of the Lab's Output

Recent work has centered on how nutrition shapes insect interactions with control agents. A 2017 paper in Scientific Reports — "Nutrition affects insect susceptibility to Bt toxins" (Deans, Behmer, Tessnow, Tamez-Guerra, Pusztai-Carey, and Sword) — argues that nutrition is a neglected factor in insect herbivore susceptibility to Bt toxins. Related commentary appeared in Current Opinion in Insect Science (2016).

If You're Considering the Lab

The site notes that prospective students and postdocs can find more information through a dedicated page, and that the group welcomes questions by contact. If your interest is in insect nutrition, sterol biology, or learning mechanisms, those three areas are the clearest entry points.