LSA (Lotte) van Lingen-Williams

My project; “The taste of diversity: How the evolution of taste has shaped the emergence of specialist insect-plant relationships” falls under the VIDI grant of Alexander Haverkamp. Like many butterflies, pieris species use gustatory information to select suitable plants for feeding and oviposition. How specific host plant preferences evolve though, is still somewhat mysterious. Currently, I’m studying the evolution and development of gustatory receptor profiles of pieris species, to shed some more light on insect-plant co-evolution.