Abstract
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 281599294 bp of clean reads, and de novo assembly generated 85206 unigenes, with N50 of 1311 bp and average length of 763 bp. We found 5002 genes highly expressed in males and 2179 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 6657 putative simple sequence repeats. The transcriptome sequences and gene expression profiles of female and male H. vigintioctopunctata help explore genetic mechanisms of sexual dimorphism.
