Journal Article

Transcriptomics of the Bed Bug (Cimex lectularius)

Bai, Xiaodong, Mittapalli, Omprakash, Jones, Susan C., Mamidala, Praveen, Rajarapu, Swapna P.

2011

Overview

Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are blood-feeding insects poised to become one of the major pests in households throughout the United States. Resistance of C. lectularius to insecticides/pesticides is one factor thought to be involved in its sudden resurgence. Despite its high-impact status, scant knowledge exists at the genomic level for C. lectularius. Hence, we subjected the C. lectularius transcriptome to 454 pyrosequencing in order to identify potential genes involved in pesticide resistance. Using 454 pyrosequencing, we obtained a total of 216,419 reads with 79,596,412 bp, which were assembled into 35,646 expressed sequence tags (3902 contigs and 31744 singletons). Nearly 85.9% of the C. lectularius sequences showed similarity to insect sequences, but 44.8% of the deduced proteins of C. lectularius did not show similarity with sequences in the GenBank non-redundant database. KEGG analysis revealed putative members of several detoxification pathways involved in pesticide resistance. Lamprin domains, Protein Kinase domains, Protein Tyrosine Kinase domains and cytochrome P450 domains were among the top Pfam domains predicted for the C. lectularius sequences. An initial assessment of putative defense genes, including a cytochrome P450 and a glutathione-S-transferase (GST), revealed high transcript levels for the cytochrome P450 (CYP9) in pesticide-exposed versus pesticide-susceptible C. lectularius populations. A significant number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (296) and microsatellite loci (370) were predicted in the C. lectularius sequences. Furthermore, 59 putative sequences of Wolbachia were retrieved from the database. To our knowledge this is the first study to elucidate the genetic makeup of C. lectularius. This pyrosequencing effort provides clues to the identification of potential detoxification genes involved in pesticide resistance of C. lectularius and lays the foundation for future functional genomics studies.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Acids / Agriculture / Agrochemicals / Animals / Annotations / Bacteria / Bed bug (Cimex lectularius) / Bedbugs - genetics / Bioinformatics / Biology / Cimex lectularius / Cytochrome / Cytochrome P450 / Cytochromes P450 / Data mining / Detoxification / Ectoparasitic Infestations / Encyclopedias / Expressed Sequence Tags / Gene expression / Gene Expression Profiling - methods / Gene sequencing / Genes / Genomes / Genomics / Glutathione / Glutathione transferase / Households / Insecticide resistance / Insecticide Resistance - genetics / Insecticides / Insecticides - pharmacology / Insects / Kinases / Medicine / Microsatellite Repeats / Microsatellites / Nucleotides / Pesticide resistance / Pesticides / Pests / Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide / Protein kinases / Protein-tyrosine kinase / Proteins / RNA, Messenger - analysis / Schistocerca gregaria / Sequence Analysis / Similarity / Single nucleotide polymorphisms / Single-nucleotide polymorphism / Tags / Transcription / Trends / Tyrosine / United States