Abstract
Insects have a complex chemosensory system that accurately perceives external chemicals and plays a pivotal role in many insect life activities. Thus, the study of the chemosensory mechanism has become an important research topic in entomology. Spodoptera exigua Hübner (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) is a major agricultural polyphagous pest that causes significant agricultural economic losses worldwide. However, except for a few genes that have been discovered, its olfactory and gustatory mechanisms remain uncertain. In the present study, we acquired 144,479 unigenes of S. exigua by assembling 65.81 giga base reads from 6 chemosensory organs (female and male antennae, female and male proboscises, and female and male labial palps), and identified many differentially expressed genes in the gustatory and olfactory organs. Analysis of the transcriptome data obtained 159 putative chemosensory genes, including 24 odorant binding proteins (OBPs; 3 were new), 19 chemosensory proteins (4 were new), 64 odorant receptors (57 were new), 22 ionotropic receptors (16 were new), and 30 new gustatory receptors. Phylogenetic analyses of all genes and SexiGRs expression patterns using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reactions were investigated. Our results found that several of these genes had differential expression features in the olfactory organs compared to the gustatory organs that might play crucial roles in the chemosensory system of S. exigua, and could be utilized as targets for future functional studies to assist in the interpretation of the molecular mechanism of the system. They could also be used for developing novel behavioral disturbance agents to control the population of the moths in the future.
Highlights
Over the evolutionary process, insects have developed a complex chemosensory system that can accurately perceive external chemicals
Our results showed that several of the genes had differential expression in olfactory organs compared to gustatory organs that might play different and crucial roles in the chemosensory system of S. exigua, and could be utilized as targets for future functional studies to assist in the interpretation of the molecular mechanism of the system
We used next-generation sequencing to sequence the six cDNA libraries constructed from the chemosensory organs (FA, male antennae (MA), female proboscises (FPr), male proboscises (MPr), female labial palps (FLP), and male labial palps (MLP)) of S. exigua adults based on the Illumina HiSeqTM 4000 platform and acquired 65.81 giga base reads
Summary
Insects have developed a complex chemosensory system that can accurately perceive external chemicals. The OBP data set contained 24 sequences from S. exigua (Table S1), and 90 from other species, including B. mori (Gong et al, 2009), M. sexta (Grosse-Wilde et al, 2011), and A. lepigone (Zhang et al, 2017b).
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