Transcriptome Analysis of Female and Male Henosepilachna vigintioctopunctata (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) Identifies Sex-related Genes

Abstract

Henosepilachna vigintioctopunctata is an emerging horticultural pest of Solanaceae plants in Asia. Here, we employed transcriptome sequencing of three female and three male H. vigintioctopunctata libraries to identify sex-related genes. We recorded 281 599 294 bp of clean reads, and de novo assembly generated 85 206 unigenes, with N50 of 1 311 bp and average length of 763 bp. We found 5 002 genes highly expressed in males and 2 179 genes highly expressed in females. Expression profiles of six unigenes specific to females, six unigenes specific to males, and ten unigenes common to both sexes were verified using semi-quantitive RT-PCR; results showed expression levels of these 22 unigenes were relatively consistent with the transcriptome analysis. Using all unigenes as references, we identified 6 657 putative simple sequence repeats. The transcriptome sequences and gene expression profiles of female and male H. vigintioctopunctata help explore genetic mechanisms of sexual dimorphism.

Keywords

• Henosepilachna vigintioctopunctata
• sex
• RNA-seq
• transcriptome annotation
• differential expression