Insects feed on leaves of plants which accumulate trace elements from soil. The profile of trace elements of insects is expected to depend upon their geographic origin. Will comparative high-resolution detection of trace elements profiles from insect, plant and soil be useful to prove a particular geographic origin of an insect?
Sounds reasonable, I have read an article published by Japanese researcher, which demonstrated that they can trace the origin of market vegetable by analyzing the elements (including rare earth elements). The problem is that you need a database huge enough to generate the function for origin tracing.
Yes, this problem is obvious. At least we can prove that the insect is originating or not from a particular geographic region of interest for which the trace elements profile is also obtained.
Another question is, how broad can be the scope of this "geographic region"?
Hi Yuri
I have researched this question along with the use of H, Sr and Pb isotopes, and the results can be found here
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0092384
There was also a small body of research looking at just TE in the 1990’s; refs given in above.
In brief, TE of insects can give spatial discrimination, but the signals are very heterogeneous regionally – so, in my opinion, only likely to be practical for within region discrimination. Also TE expression in insects may be confounded by biological factors (gender, age, stress) (but these can be minimised, eg., only use recently emerged individuals of one gender). On the other hand, isotope systems are much more powerful discriminators, which can further improved when considered, multivariate-wise, with TE. If you pursue this field of research, have many insects per treatment and take into account/ minimise factors than may confound signal expression.
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