De novo assembly and analysis of the Heortia vitessoides transcriptome via high-throughput Illumina sequencing

Abstract

Heortia vitessoides Moore, a defoliating pest in Aquilaria sinensis (Loureiro) Sprenger forests, is responsible for significant damage to the trees. There is a lack of nucleotide and protein sequence information for H. vitessoides. Hence, in this study, the transcriptome of H. vitessoides was sequenced using the Illumina Hiseq 2000 platform to evaluate the expression profiles and predict the functional genes. A total of 60,587,900 clean reads were produced and de novo assembled into 66,673 unigenes of average length 957bp; 28,202 and 27,339 identified unigenes were annotated using the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) non-redundant (NR) database and Swiss-Prot database, respectively. All assembled unigenes were categorized into 64 biological processes, cellular components, or molecular functions using Gene Ontology (GO). In total, 24,278 unigenes were annotated using a database of eukaryotic orthologous groups (KOG) and assigned to 25 functional categories. Of these, 9172 unigenes had matches in the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and were assigned to 344 KEGG pathways. In addition, there were 11,670 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in 66,673 unigenes and 64 repeated motif types, of which A/T was the most frequent. We also found that 1000 unigenes were related to insecticide resistance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive transcriptome analysis for H. vitessoides, providing valuable genome data sources for the study of the molecular biology of this pest.