Although phylogenetically nested with moths, extant butterfly species have diverged extensively from their night-flying relatives in a number of life history traits including typical bright appearances, diurnal lifestyles, body and antennal shapes, and mate finding behaviours. 

Female butterflies have lost long-distance sex pheromones used exclusively by female moths for mate finding. Instead it is customary for male butterflies to patrol for females in stereotyped visually oriented search behaviours. When it comes to chemical signalling, courting males often display complex bouquets of scents at close range that play a role in species recognition and/or female acceptance. The various scent-releasing structures and great chemical diversity in volatile male pheromone components including plant-derivatives such as alkaloids, aromatics or carboxylic acids, suggests that the underlying biosynthetic machineries have evolved multiple times independently. I studied the molecular and functional architecture of the male courtship scents in Bicyclus anynana, to investigate the molecular origin and the evolutionary basis underlying biosynthesis of two male pheromone components (Z9-14:Alcohol and 16:Aldehyde) (Nieberding et al 2008) interestingly similar in structure with many female moth pheromone structures. Together with collaborators at Lund University, I dissected the genetic and functional organization of the two major biosynthetic steps—the desaturation and the reduction steps—and using a multidisciplinary approach, showed that Bicyclus wing pheromone signaling shares its genetic basis and functional mechanism with those of moths (Liénard et al., 2014). In addition, by mining butterfly genomes I found existing conservation of biosynthetic gene clades in important butterfly systems such as Danaus and Heliconius.

Altogether, the findings in our study provide critical evidence for the sharing of ancestral genetic modules between moths and butterflies over long evolutionary timeframe thus reconciling the evolutionary history of genes that are involved in the production of fatty-acid derived volatile chemicals across Lepidoptera.