Abstract
Thrips tabaci Lindeman is an important polyphagous insect pest species estimated to cause losses of more than U.S. $1 billion worldwide annually. Chemical insecticides are of limited use in the management of T. tabaci due to the thigmokinetic behavior and development of resistance to insecticides. There is an urgent need to find alternative management strategies. Small noncoding RNAs (sncRNAs) especially microRNAs (miRNAs) hold great promise as key regulators of gene expression in a wide range of organisms. MiRNAs are a group of endogenously originated sncRNA known to regulate gene expression in animals, plants, and protozoans. In this study, we explored these RNAs in T. tabaci using deep sequencing to provide a basis for future studies of their biological and physiological roles in governing gene expression. Apart from snoRNAs and piRNAs, our study identified nine novel and 130 known miRNAs from T. tabaci. Functional classification of the targets for these miRNAs predicted that majority are involved in regulating transcription, translation, signal transduction and genetic information processing. The higher expression of few miRNAs (such as tta‐miR‐281, tta‐miR‐184, tta‐miR‐3533, tta‐miR‐N1, tta‐miR‐N7, and tta‐miR‐N9) in T. tabaci pupal and adult stages reflected their possible role in larval and adult development, metamorphosis, parthenogenesis, and reproduction. This is the first exploration of the miRNAome in T. tabaci, which not only provides insights into their possible role in insect metamorphosis, growth, and development but also offer an important resource for future pest management strategies.
Highlights
| INTRODUCTIONThrips tabaci Lindemann (Figure 1), is an important polyphagous insect pest species (Lewis, 1973) belonging to the family
Onion thrips, Thrips tabaci Lindemann (Figure 1), is an important polyphagous insect pest species (Lewis, 1973) belonging to the familyThripidae
The result from our study add to the pool of miRNA databases and is the first report of small RNAs from T. tabaci, a nonmodel insect lacking genome information
Summary
Thrips tabaci Lindemann (Figure 1), is an important polyphagous insect pest species (Lewis, 1973) belonging to the family. After various mapping (Table 1), the trimmed high-q uality small RNA reads were employed to identify Both known and novel miRNAs. Size distributions of the trimmed high- quality reads were varied from 18 to 26 nts with a peak at the 23 nts (Figure 2). A small portion of our library consisted of read length of around 26–28 nts, which could be putative piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) from T. tabaci as the homology search against the piRNABank database revealed that some of these were similar to previously reported piRNAs (Table 2). This study has identified mir-9774 (Expression value 6), a plant microRNA family in our T. tabaci sRNA library (Table 3). The Blast-2-GO enrichment analysis was performed employing gene ontology (GO) terms for genes targeted by these miRNAs (Figure 5a,b) For those targets in the ESTs, three motifs were over-represented in GO–BP (biological process) category viz. Results suggested that the miRNA expression was higher in pupal and adult stages compared to larval stages in six microRNAs such as tta-miR-281, tta-miR-184, tta-miR-3533, tta-miR-N1, tta-miR-N7, and tta-miR-N9 (Figure 8b)
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