An Engineered Stealth Beetle to Explore Behavioral Response Thresholds to Small Molecules

Project objectives:

• Generate chemically invisible "stealth" rove beetle using CRISPR/CAS9 gene editing.
• Develop behavioral analysis platform and machine vision pipeline to quantify beetle-ant interactions.
• Quantify how CHC manipulations elicit ant and beetle behavioral response transitions.
• Model behavioral responses of ants and beetles across a continuum of CHC similarity.