Bemisia tabaci

The whitefly Bemisia tabaci is an important vector transmitting hundreds of plant viruses. It causes serious yield loss to several major crops such as tomato, cassava, cotton, cucurbits and sweet potato, affecting global food security. Genomic resources will open new avenue for developing novel strategies for whitefly management. We sequenced and annotated B. tabaci biotype MEAM1 (formerly B biotype) isogenic colony developed at USDA-ARS in Charleston, SC. Three paired-end ranging from 300 bp to 1kb and three mate-pair libraries ranging from 3kb to 20 kb were constructed and sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq 2500. All datasets were assembled into 260Gb which is approximately 360X coverage of an estimated genome size of 690 Mb. Additionally, we generated ~13 Gb (~20X of the genome) using PacBio sequencing. A Draft genome size of 615 Mb with an N50 length of 3.2 Mb was assembled using both Illumina and PacBio reads. Gene prediction of the draft genome resulted in 15,664 protein coding genes.

Chen W, Hasegawa DK, Kaur N, Kliot A, Pinheiro PV, Luan J, Stensmyr MC, Zheng Y, Liu W, Sun H, Xu Y, Luo Y, Kruse A, Yang X, Kontsedalov S, Lebedev G, Fisher TW, Nelson DR, Hunter WB, Brown JK, Jander G, Cilia M, Douglas AE, Ghanim M, Simmons AM, Wintermantel WM, Ling K-S, Fei Z (2016) The draft genome of whitefly Bemisia tabaci MEAM1, a global crop pest, provides novel insights into virus transmission, host adaptation, and insecticide resistance. BMC Biology 14:110

Image Credit: International Whitefly Genome Initiative. View Source.