De novo transcriptome of the desert beetle Microdera punctipennis.pdf

De novo transcriptome of the desert beetle Microdera punctipennis (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) using illumina RNA-seq technology Xueying Lu ? Jieqiong Li ? Jianhuan Yang ? Xiaoning Liu ? Ji Ma Received: 12 September 2013 / Accepted: 15 July 2014 / Published online: 21 August 2014  The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at S Abstract Insects in Tenebrionidae have unique stress adaptations that allow them to survive temperature extremes. We report here a gene expression profiling of Microdera punctipennis, a beetle in desert region, to gain a global view of its environmental adaptations. A total of 48,158,004 reads were obtained by transcriptome sequencing, and the de novo assembly yielded 56,348 unigenes with an average length of 666 bp. Based on similarity searches with a cut-off E-value of 10-5 against two protein sequence databases, 41,109 of the unigenes (about 72.96 %) were matched to known proteins. An in- depth analysis of the data revealed a large number of genes were associated with environmental stress, including genes that encode heat shock proteins, antifreeze proteins, and enzymes such as chitinase, trehalose, and trehalose-6- phosphate synthase. This study generated a substantial number of M. punctipennis transcript sequences that can be used to discover novel genes associated with stress adap- tation. These sequences are a valuable resource for future studies of the desert beetle and other insects in Tenebri- onidae. Transcriptome analysis based on Illumina paired- end sequencing is a powerful approach for gene discovery and molecular marker development for non-model species. Keywords Microdera punctipennis  Transcriptome  Illumina sequencing  Heat shock protein  Antifreeze protein Introduction Deserts are among the most hostile habitats on earth. In summer, it is extremely hot during daytime, while in the depth of the winter’s night, it is surprisingly cold, as well as extremely dry in some seasons. Under these extreme con-