Tissue-Specific Transcriptomics of the Exotic Invasive Insect Pest Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis)
Open Access
- 28 October 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Public Library of Science (PLoS) in PLOS ONE
- Vol. 5 (10), e13708
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013708
Abstract
The insect midgut and fat body represent major tissue interfaces that deal with several important physiological functions including digestion, detoxification and immune response. The emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), is an exotic invasive insect pest that has killed millions of ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) primarily in the Midwestern United States and Ontario, Canada. However, despite its high impact status little knowledge exists for A. planipennis at the molecular level. Newer-generation Roche-454 pyrosequencing was used to obtain 126,185 reads for the midgut and 240,848 reads for the fat body, which were assembled into 25,173 and 37,661 high quality expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for the midgut and the fat body of A. planipennis larvae, respectively. Among these ESTs, 36% of the midgut and 38% of the fat body sequences showed similarity to proteins in the GenBank nr database. A high number of the midgut sequences contained chitin-binding peritrophin (248)and trypsin (98) domains; while the fat body sequences showed high occurrence of cytochrome P450s (85) and protein kinase (123) domains. Further, the midgut transcriptome of A. planipennis revealed putative microbial transcripts encoding for cell-wall degrading enzymes such as polygalacturonases and endoglucanases. A significant number of SNPs (137 in midgut and 347 in fat body) and microsatellite loci (317 in midgut and 571 in fat body) were predicted in the A. planipennis transcripts. An initial assessment of cytochrome P450s belonging to various CYP clades revealed distinct expression patterns at the tissue level. To our knowledge this study is one of the first to illuminate tissue-specific gene expression in an invasive insect of high ecological and economic consequence. These findings will lay the foundation for future gene expression and functional studies in A. planipennis.Keywords
This publication has 68 references indexed in Scilit:
- Applications of next-generation sequencing technologies in functional genomicsGenomics, 2008
- A C. elegans Piwi, PRG-1, Regulates 21U-RNAs during SpermatogenesisCurrent Biology, 2008
- KEGG for linking genomes to life and the environmentNucleic Acids Research, 2007
- Silencing a cotton bollworm P450 monooxygenase gene by plant-mediated RNAi impairs larval tolerance of gossypolNature Biotechnology, 2007
- Antioxidant defense response in a galling insectProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007
- Tdrd1/Mtr-1 , a tudor -related gene, is essential for male germ-cell differentiation and nuage/germinal granule formation in miceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006
- Blast2GO: a universal tool for annotation, visualization and analysis in functional genomics researchBioinformatics, 2005
- A new mathematical model for relative quantification in real-time RT-PCRNucleic Acids Research, 2001
- KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and GenomesNucleic Acids Research, 2000
- Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programsNucleic Acids Research, 1997