Apterygota in the spotlights of ecology, evolution and genomics

Wingless basal hexapods, also known as Apterygota, are becoming more and more important as models to study general biological principles, a situation testified by papers presented at the VIIth Apterygota seminar held August 2006 at Texel, The Netherlands. In this short review we discern three areas of modern biology where Apterygota may obtain a position in the spotlight: (1) ecology: Apterygota communities can contribute to testing hypotheses about species traits, community composition and ecosystem function, (2) evolution: Apterygota are a crucial link in the deep phylogeny of the arthropods, (3) genomics: transcription profiling of apterygote model species can contribute to soil assessment and a better mechanistic understanding of how soil invertebrates may adapt to soil pollution. We describe these three areas and the exciting developments going on in each.