WaspBase: a genomic resource for the interactions among parasitic wasps, insect hosts and plants.

Longfei Chen,Fei Li,Shoudong Bi,Kang He,Jiadan Xu,Jiapeng Luo,Feiling Liu,Xinhai Ye,Xuexin Chen,Kun Lang,Gongyin Ye

doi:10.1093/database/bay081

Abstract

Insect pests reduce yield and cause economic losses, which are major problems in agriculture. Parasitic wasps are the natural enemies of many agricultural pests and thus have been widely used as biological control agents. Plants, phytophagous insects and parasitic wasps form a tritrophic food chain. Understanding the interactions in this tritrophic system should be helpful for developing parasitic wasps for pest control and deciphering the mechanisms of parasitism. However, the genomic resources for this tritrophic system are not well organized. Here, we describe the WaspBase, a new database that contains 573 transcriptomes of 35 parasitic wasps and the genomes of 12 parasitic wasps, 5 insect hosts and 8 plants. In addition, we identified long non-coding RNA, untranslated regions and 25 widely studied gene families from the genome and transcriptome data of these species. WaspBase provides conventional web services such as Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, search and download, together with several widely used tools such as profile hidden Markov model, Multiple Alignment using Fast Fourier Transform, automated alignment trimming and JBrowse. We also present a collection of active researchers in the field of parasitic wasps, which should be useful for constructing scientific networks in this field.

Highlights

Insects are the most widely distributed animal species on earth
We collected the genome data of 12 parasitic wasps from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) including Ceratosolen solmsi, Copidosoma floridanum, Cotesia vestalis, Diachasma alloeum, Fopius arisanus, Microplitis demolitor, Macrocentrus cingulum, Nasonia giraulti, Niphoparmena longicornis, Nasonia vitripennis, Orussus abietinus and Trichogramma pretiosum (Figure 1) [8, 9, 11]
The references reporting the interactions between parasitic wasps, insect hosts and plants were given in supplementary table S1

Summary

Introduction

Insects are the most widely distributed animal species on earth. Most insects are herbivores that cause huge yield losses when feeding on crops. Five parasitic wasps [4,8,9,10,11], six insect hosts [12,13,14,15,16,17,18] and six plants [19,20,21,22,23,24] were publicly reported. We collected the genome and transcriptome data of 34 parasitic wasps, 9 insect hosts and 8 plants from NCBI, i5k workspace@NAL [25] and InsectBase [7]. We constructed a database, which we named WaspBase, to serve as an integrated genomic resource for a tritrophic system of wasps, hosts and plants.

Results

Conclusion