Parental care was likely the first step most lineages made towards sociality. However, the molecular mechanisms that generate parental care are not broadly characterized. Insects are important as an evolutionary independent group from classic models of parental care, such as, house mice. They provide an opportunity to test the generality of our understanding. With this review, I survey the functional genomics of parental care of insects, summarize several recent advances in the broader framework for studying and understanding parental care, and finish with suggested priorities for further research. Although there are too few studies to draw definitive conclusions, I argue that natural selection appears to be rewiring existing gene networks to produce parental care, that the epigenetic mechanisms influencing parental care are not well understood, and, as an interesting early consensus, that genes strongly associated with carer/offspring interactions appear biased towards proteins that are secreted. I summarize the studies that have functionally validate candidate genes and highlight the increasing need to perform this work. I finish with arguments for both conceptual and practical changes moving forward. I argue that future work can increase the use of predictive frameworks, broaden its definition of conservation of mechanism to gene networks rather than single genes, and increase the use of more established comparative methods. I further highlight the practical considerations of standardizing analyses and reporting, increasing the sampling of both carers and offspring, better characterizing gene regulatory networks, better characterizing taxonomically restricted genes and any consistent role they have underpinning parental care, and using factorial designs to disentangle the influence of multiple variables on the expression of parental care.

中文翻译：

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昆虫父母照顾的功能基因组学。

父母照料可能是大多数世系向社会迈出的第一步。但是，产生父母照料的分子机制尚未广泛表征。作为经典的父母关怀模型（例如家鼠），昆虫作为一个进化独立的群体非常重要。它们提供了检验我们理解的一般性的机会。通过这篇综述，我调查了昆虫父母照顾的功能基因组学，总结了研究和了解父母照顾的更广泛框架中的一些最新进展，并提出了需要进一步研究的建议重点。尽管很少有研究得出明确的结论，但我认为自然选择似乎正在重新连接现有的基因网络以产生父母照料，而影响父母照料的表观遗传机制尚未得到很好的理解，并且，作为一个有趣的早期共​​识，与看护者/后代相互作用密切相关的基因似乎偏向于分泌的蛋白质。我总结了在功能上验证候选基因的研究，并强调了进行这项工作的日益增长的需求。最后，我提出了关于概念性和实践性变化的论点。我认为，未来的工作可以增加对预测框架的使用，将其对机制保守性的定义扩大到基因网络而不是单个基因，并增加使用更成熟的比较方法。我进一步强调了标准化分析和报告，增加照料者和后代的采样，更好地表征基因调控网络的实践性考虑，