Class-wide sequence, structural, and docking-profile diversity of insect odorant receptors and structural specialization of Orco.

A highly conserved extracellular β-sheet in Orco restricts ligand access to its binding pocket and may contribute to reduced binding of natural odorants.

• Why it matters: Sequence divergence and lineage-specific OR expansions have hindered class-wide comparisons of insect odorant receptor repertoires across many species.
• What they did: They analyzed ORs from 115 insect species using integrated sequence similarity, structural similarity, and large-scale molecular docking, plus a trunk-branch network to classify ORs into docking-profile communities.
• The result: OR repertoire size is linked to adult diet, larval diet, and habitat (not circadian rhythm), while holometabolous insects show higher OR sequence-community diversity and docking-profile composition differs across lineages around the end-Permian extinction.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.