Summary: | Henosepilachna vigintioctopunctata is an emerging horticultural pest of Solanaceae plants in Asia. Here, we employed transcriptome sequencing of three female and three male H. vigintioctopunctata libraries to identify sex-related genes. We recorded 281 599 294 bp of clean reads, and de novo assembly generated 85 206 unigenes, with N50 of 1 311 bp and average length of 763 bp. We found 5 002 genes highly expressed in males and 2 179 genes highly expressed in females. Expression profiles of six unigenes specific to females, six unigenes specific to males, and ten unigenes common to both sexes were verified using semi-quantitive RT-PCR; results showed expression levels of these 22 unigenes were relatively consistent with the transcriptome analysis. Using all unigenes as references, we identified 6 657 putative simple sequence repeats. The transcriptome sequences and gene expression profiles of female and male H. vigintioctopunctata help explore genetic mechanisms of sexual dimorphism.
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