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Title: Draft Transcriptome Assembly of the Tobacco Budworm, Heliothis virescens (L.)

Author
item Shelby, Kent
item Perera, Omaththage

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/10/2010
Publication Date: 6/10/2010
Citation: Shelby, K., Perera, O.P. 2010. Draft Transcriptome Assembly of the Tobacco Budworm, Heliothis virescens (L.) [abstract]. Arthropod Genomics Symposium. 52:37.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Massively parallel next generation sequencing technologies have revolutionized the acquisition and analysis of transcriptomes from beneficial and pest insects. Heliothine moths are major polyphagous pests of commodity crops such as maize, cotton, soybeans and vegetables throughout the world. Control of larvae of the North American pest moth Heliothis virescens, also known as the tobacco budworm, and other closely related heliothines would be fundamentally advanced by understanding--and disrupting--the basic mechanisms underlying resistance to insecticides, entomopathogens and parasitoids. An iterative de novo budworm exome assembly was constructed by combining Illumina and Sanger reads. For this first assembly of a budworm exome a total of 43,201,749 high quality input sequences assembled into 69,643 contigs with an average length of 339 bases (average coverage of 21). Cumulative contig length and the total sequence lengths were 21,984,026 and 698,317,284 nucleotides, respectively. 1831 contigs were greater than 2000 bases in length. This newly constructed annotated exome will constitute the reference assembly for all future functional genomic studies of this pest species utilizing next-generation RNA-seq digital transcript profiling and other methods.