Currently, I have rearing activity on Scirpophaga, Nilaparvata, and Spodoptera. We need to ship these insect for molecular analysis purpose to another country. For this reason, lyophilizing the insect sample is required. Is there somebody have experience in lyophilizing insect sample, especially for Lepidoptera (larvae or adult insect) and Homoptera? I would be very thankful if anyone could help me to share any protocol of lyophilization of insect sample :)
when you freeze dry an insect, it becomes extremely fragile and the legs, antennea etc break off. If you require anatomic integrity, You must first fix the tissues using acetic acid or formalin and then dehydrat the sample using alcohol. If there are proteins and enzymes that are being studied, you cannot fix the insect tissue. The best approach for that is to remove the relevent tissue and freeze it. Then grind to a powder and lyophilize the powder.
Just lyophilizing is not helpful. It just remove water content maintaining chemical integrity. Better extract DNA from freshly collected samples and carry it suitably. Alternatively carry ice preserved specimen.
I agree with Dr Udikeri if you are analyzing DNA. Treatment of the sample should be tailored to the analysis required
I freeze dried lots of caterpillars for chemical analysis. To me morphological preservation seems to be surprisingly good. It's easily possible to even dissect freeze dried caterpillars (see here http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1818/20151865) and it would not surprise me if it was possible to also extract DNA and RNA. We've successfully extracted RNA from freeze dried butterfly antennae...
Freeze drying is a very useful technique but if the Objective of the Researcher is cl;early understood , then may be the Scholars will easily be able to answer this question . The last answer from Petschenka does also seem quite productive for the purpose. But still the final intention / use of the Insect sample must be known.
Many years ago I prepared Luciferase from lightning bugs by removing the abdomens and freeze drying the tissue prior to purification. Now I believe that recombinant Luciferase is available.
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