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Title: Nutrigenomics in Arma chinensis: transcriptome analysis of Arma chinensis fed on artificial diet and Chinese oak silk moth Antheraea pernyi pupae

Author
item ZOU, DEYU - Chinese Academy Of Agricultural Sciences
item Coudron, Thomas
item LUI, CHENXI - Chinese Academy Of Agricultural Sciences
item ZHANG, LISHENG - Chinese Academy Of Agricultural Sciences
item WANG, MENGQING - Chinese Academy Of Agricultural Sciences
item CHEN, HONGVIN - Chinese Academy Of Agricultural Sciences

Submitted to: PLOS ONE
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/29/2013
Publication Date: 4/10/2013
Citation: Zou, D., Coudron, T.A., Lui, C., Zhang, L., Wang, M., Chen, H. 2013. Nutrigenomics in Arma chinensis: transcriptome analysis of Arma chinensis fed on artificial diet and Chinese oak silk moth Antheraea pernyi pupae. PLoS One. 8(4):Article e60881. Available: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0060881.

Interpretive Summary: The molecular mechanisms underlying the effect of dietary changes in insects are mostly unknown. Yet, this information is critically important for the production of healthy beneficial insects that are marketed for biological control. This article reports differences in gene expressions caused by dietary changes in a beneficial predatory insect. By matching physiological roles with those genes that were up- or down-regulated as a result of nutritional changes researchers are now able to correlate nutritional effects to the health and performance of beneficial insects. Additionally, the commercial sector can use this information to develop improved diet formulations in future rearing efforts.

Technical Abstract: Background: The insect predator, Arma chinensis (Fallou), is capable of effectively controlling many pests, such as Colorado potato beetle, cotton bollworm, and mirid bugs. Life history parameters were not as good for A. chinensis when reared on an artificial diet compared to Chinese oak silk moth pupae. The molecular mechanism underlying the nutritive impact of the artificial diet on the health of A. chinensis was unknown. We utilized a transcriptome for this species to provide a better understand of the impact of the artificial diet on A. chinensis. Methodology/Principal Findings: The Illumina HiSeq2000 was used to sequence 4.79 and 4.70 Gb of the transcriptome from pupae-fed and artificial diet-fed A. chinensis libraries, respectively, and performed a de novo transcriptome assembly (Trinity short-read assembler). This resulted in 112,029 and 98,724 contigs, clustered into 54,083 and 54,169 unigenes for pupae-fed and diet-fed A. chinensis, respectively. Unigenes from each sample's assembly underwent sequence splicing and redundancy removal to acquire non-redundant unigenes. We obtained 55,189 unigenes of A. chinensis, including 12,046 distinct clusters and 43,143 distinct singletons. Unigene sequences were aligned by BLASTx to nr, Swiss-Prot, KEGG, and COG (E-value < 10**-5), and further aligned by BLASTn to nt (E-value < 10**-5), retrieving proteins of highest sequence similarity with the given unigenes along with their protein functional annotations. Totally, 22,964, 7,898, 18,069, 15,416, 8,066, and 5,341 unigenes were annotated in nr, nt, Swiss-Prot, KEGG, COG and GO, respectively. We compared gene expression variations, and found thousands of genes were differentially expressed between pupae-fed and diet-fed A. chinensis. Conclusions/Significance: Our study provides abundant genomic data and offers comprehensive sequence information for studying A. chinensis. Additionally, the physiological roles of the differentially expressed genes enabled us to project effects of some dietary ingredients and subsequently to propose formulation improvements to the artificial diet.