Transcriptome analysis of a social caterpillar, Drepana arcuata: De novo assembly, functional annotation and developmental analysis.

ABSTRACT: The masked birch caterpillar, Drepana arcuata, provides an excellent opportunity to study mechanisms mediating developmental changes in social behaviour. Larvae transition from being social to solitary during the 3rd instar, concomitant with shifts in their use of acoustic communication. In this study we characterize the transcriptome of D. arcuata to initiate sociogenomic research of this lepidopteran insect. We assembled and annotated the combined larval transcriptome of "social" early and "solitary" late instars using next generation Illumina sequencing, and used this transcriptome to conduct differential gene expression analysis of the two behavioural phenotypes. A total of 211,012,294 reads generated by RNA sequencing were assembled into 231,348 transcripts and 116,079 unigenes for th

SUBMITTER: Yadav C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7307738 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature