Akito Y. Kawahara

The paper presents the first high-quality genomes of two webspinner species, revealing complex silk gene structures and gland morphology through genomics and CT imaging.

The paper assesses protected habitat availability for the declining Loammi skipper butterfly in Florida, finding over half of its habitat is in protected areas.

This study identifies auditory genes in moths through evolutionary analysis and finds evidence of selection in hearing-related genes.

This study finds that U.S. butterflies listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) receive more research attention, with increased publications after listing compared to non-listed species.

This study examines how climate and regional plant richness influence diet specialization in butterfly caterpillars using global distribution data.

This study examines the morphology of hawkmoth compound eyes, finding they are near-spherical with low spatial acuity variation and lack distinct acute zones.

This study characterizes sericin gene evolution in the Luna moth, revealing gene duplications, repeat variation, and subfunctionalization across life stages and species.

The paper investigates how antipredator traits in skipper butterflies evolve in response to environmental variation, finding convergent evolution and rapid diversification of wing shape and color.

The paper evaluates the evolutionary balance between bat predation pressure and environmental constraints on moth tail length using phylogenetic and ecological data.

This study identifies lineage-specific gene families in butterflies and moths, revealing dietary adaptations linked to plant detoxification and horizontal gene transfer.

The paper identifies sex-specific chemosensory gene expression in Hyles lineata, highlighting odorant-binding proteins (OBPs) as candidates for host plant selection in females.

This paper develops a CRISPR-based diagnostic method using CO1 gene targeting to detect invasive moth pests with high accuracy and sensitivity.

The paper introduces two open-source tools to automatically measure compound eye optics from 2D images and 3D CT data, validated on insect specimens.

The paper reveals extensive allelic variation in silk genes across insect and spider species using long-read sequencing, highlighting convergent patterns in structural protein-coding genes.

This study uses HiFi long-read sequencing to assemble repetitive heavy fibroin genes in moth and caddisfly genomes, demonstrating its effectiveness for such challenging regions.