On Mar. 27, 2013, researchers at the University of British Columbia and Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre announced they had decoded the genome of the mountain pine beetle – the insect that has devastated B.C.’s lodgepole pine forests

This was a first for the mountain pine beetle and only the second beetle genome ever sequenced. The first was the red flour beetle, a pest of stored grains. The genome was described in a study published in the journal Genome Biology.