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The Colorado potato beetle is one of the most challenging agricultural pests to manage. It has shown a spectacular ability to adapt to a variety of solanaceaeous plants and variable climates during its global invasion, and, notably, to rapidly evolve insecticide resistance. To examine evidence of rapid evolutionary change, and to understand the genetic basis of herbivory and insecticide resistance, we tested for structural and functional genomic changes relative to other arthropod species using genome sequencing, transcriptomics, and community annotation. Two factors that might facilitate rapid evolutionary change include transposable elements, which comprise at least 17% of the genome and are rapidly evolving compared to other Coleoptera, and high levels of nucleotide diversity in rapidly growing pest populations. Adaptations to plant feeding are evident in gene expansions and differential expression of digestive enzymes in gut tissues, as well as expansions of gustatory receptors for bitter tasting. Surprisingly, the suite of genes involved in insecticide resistance is similar to other beetles. Finally, duplications in the RNAi pathway might explain why Leptinotarsa decemlineata has high sensitivity to dsRNA. The L. decemlineata genome provides opportunities to investigate a broad range of phenotypes and to develop sustainable methods to control this widely successful pest.

Background Sociality has many rewards, but can also be dangerous, as high population density and low genetic diversity, common in social insects, is ideal for parasite transmission. Despite this risk, honeybees and other sequenced social insects have far fewer canonical immune genes relative to solitary insects. Social protection from infection, including behavioral responses, may explain this depauperate immune repertoire. Here, based on full genome sequences, we describe the immune repertoire of two ecologically and commercially important bumblebee species that diverged approximately 18 million years ago, the North American Bombus impatiens and European Bombus terrestris. Results We find that the immune systems of these bumblebees, two species of honeybee, and a solitary leafcutting bee, are strikingly similar. Transcriptional assays confirm the expression of many of these genes in an immunological context and more strongly in young queens than males, affirming Bateman’s principle of greater investment in female immunity. We find evidence of positive selection in genes encoding antiviral responses, components of the Toll and JAK/STAT pathways, and serine protease inhibitors in both social and solitary bees. Finally, we detect many genes across pathways that differ in selection between bumblebees and honeybees, or between the social and solitary clades. Conclusions The similarity in immune complement across a gradient of sociality suggests that a reduced immune repertoire predates the evolution of sociality in bees. The differences in selection on immune genes likely reflect divergent pressures exerted by parasites across social contexts., Genome Biology, 16, ISSN:1474-760X

It is a fixed custom that Belgian and Dutch universities take turns to organize the biannual Belgian-Dutch Legal History Conference. On 11 and 12 December 2014 the twenty-first edition of this conference was held at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The conference traditionally serves as a platform for ongoing legal-historical research and it provides a forum for presentations by young scholars. This book bundles the papers that were presented at the Brussels conference and which are the outcome of a process of double-blind peer review. The papers demonstrate the variety of topics and methods that are currently being practised among legal historians. The nineteenth-century insistence on either Roman or national law, which to a large extent lives on in education, cannot be retrieved in present-day research. For some topics, such as international law, labour law and commercial law, recent research initiatives are abundant, and this is well reflected in the contents of this book. There is also renewal in terms of methodology. Legal historians do no longer limit themselves to an analysis of legal texts. Attention goes to legal practice, both in its formative aspects, as well as to the application of legal texts (laws, treaties, …). Political and legal history are more commonly being blended together. A thorough contextual approach includes analyses of institutional, political and legal developments. The contributions by Paul Nève, Brecht Deseure, Raymond Kubben and Shavanah Musa provide examples of this method. Furthermore, links between political philosophy and law are explored, which is evident in the chapters written by Maarten Colette and Lukas van den Berge. Doctrine is considered from a contextual viewpoint as well. Frederik Dhondt highlights the impact of the Spanish War of Succession on the scholarly writings of Vattel and Réal de Curban. Another development in contemporary legal-historical research is the comparative approach. In his text, Wouter Druwé draws up a comparison between the Roman condictio and the English writ of debt. Agustin Parise traces the influence of the Dutch Civil Code (1838) in the Argentine code of 1871. Matthias Castelein examines the relations between Genoese and Corsican government. Marten Reijntjes focuses on the responsibility of judges from a comparative-historical perspective. Benoît Lagasse details the ideas of the Liège jurist Charles de Méan against the background of the Roman and local legal traditions. The interactions between Belgian and Dutch jurists over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are analysed in the contribution of Sebastiaan Vandenbogaerde. This book provides ample evidence of the rich nature of legal-historical scholarship in the Low Countries of today. May it be a steppingstone for further research.

Whole insect assays where Rhizoctonia solani agglutinin (RSA) was fed to larval stages of the cotton leaf-worm Spodoptera littoralis and the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum demonstrated a high concentration-dependent entomotoxicity, suggesting that this GalNAc/Gal-specific fungal lectin might be a good control agent for different pest insects. RSA at 10 mg/g in the solid diet of 2nd-instar caterpillars caused 84% weight reduction after 8 days with none of the caterpillars reaching the 4th-instar stage. In sucking aphids, 50% mortality was achieved after 3 days with 9 μM of RSA in the liquid diet. Feeding of FITC-labeled RSA to both insect pest species revealed strong lectin binding at the apical/luminal side of the midgut epithelium with the brush border zone, suggesting the insect midgut as a primary insecticide target tissue for RSA. This was also confirmed with cell cultures in vitro, where there was high fluorescence binding at the microvillar zone with primary cultures of larval midgut columnar cells of S. littoralis, and also at the surface with the insect midgut CF-203 cell line without lectin uptake in the midgut cells. In vitro assays using insect midgut CF-203 cells, revealed that RSA was highly toxic with an EC50 of 0.3 μM. Preincubation with GalNAc and saponin indicated that this action of RSA was carbohydrate-binding dependent and happened at the surface of the cells. Intoxicated CF-203 cells showed symptoms of apoptosis as nuclear condensation and DNA fragmentation, and this concurred with an increase of caspase-3/7, -8 and -9 activities. Finally, RSA affinity chromatography of membrane extracts of CF-203 cells followed by LC-MS/MS allowed the identification of 5747 unique peptides, among which four putatively glycosylated membrane proteins that are associated with apoptosis induction, namely Fas-associated factor, Apoptosis-linked gene-2, Neuroglian and CG2076, as potential binding targets for RSA. These data are discussed in relation to the physiological effects of RSA.

The ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau provide a middle ground between thin-rope liberal views on and neo-roman approaches towards liberty. Rousseau's ideas on liberty are not negative or based on non-domination. Instead, Rousseau takes participation in political life as paramount and construes freedom as liberating and constraining at the same time. In so doing, Rousseau, and also Benjamin Constant in his footsteps, revived the ancient idea of man’s self-fulfilment in politics, but they also updated it to make it fit for modern times. “To be free” according to Rousseau is to act with respect for the common good.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713/1714) counts as a continent- and even world-spanning confrontation among the main European powers. Its long shadow hung over diplomacy for almost three decades until a new world conflagration arose in 1740. The war remains a subject of controversy in diplomatic history, and has been of paramount importance to contemporary eighteenth-century journalists, historians, philosophers and legal scholars. "La dernière guerre" counted as an anti-norm, a situation never to return to, and a permanent deterrent. Yet, as time progressed another conflicts dominated the world stage, the conflict became an object of legal writing, as it seemingly lost much of its contentiousness. Emer de Vattel (1717-1767), author of the much-acclaimed Droit des gens (Leiden: 1757) and abbot Réal de Curban (1682-1752), whose Science du Gouvernement (Paris: les libraires associés, 1764) covers the law of nations as well, took the war as an object to illustrate diverse themata of the law of nations:treaties, ius ad bellum, embassies or alliances. The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how Vattel, writing from a specific Swiss and German perspective, took a different strand of argumentation from that of Réal de Curban, who repeated at several instances the French crown's point of view. Although both authors' use of historical material evokes strict objectivity, they continued the war in their selective use of exempla. Whereas Réal has fallen into relative oblivion, Vattel counts among the classics of International Law. Consequently, the image of the war in doctrine tends to be one-sided. Incoherences and contradictions in Vattel's work are not uncommon. The War of the Spanish Succession can serve as an example of the gulf between doctrinal tradition and practical legal argumentation, or of the instrumental use of history in two distinct elaborations of a shared natural law-framework. Classifying Vattel as a "Tier I"-author and Réal as inferior is not a neutral operation.