title: An EST database of the Caribbean fruit fly, Anastrepha suspensa (Diptera: Tephritidae).
abstract: Invasive tephritid fruit flies are a great threat to agriculture worldwide and warrant serious pest control measures. Molecular strategies that promote embryonic lethality in these agricultural pests are limited by the small amount of nucleotide sequence data available for tephritids. To increase the dataset for sequence mining, we generated an EST database by 454 sequencing of the caribfly, Anastrepha suspensa, a model tephritid pest. This database yielded 95,803 assembled sequences with 24% identified as independent transcripts. The percentage of caribfly sequences with hits to the closely related tephritid, Rhagoletis pomonella, transcriptome was higher (28%) than to Drosophila proteins/genes (18%) in NCBI. The database contained genes specifically expressed in embryos, genes involved in the cell death, sex-determination, and RNAi pathways, and transposable elements and microsatellites. This study significantly expands the nucleotide data available for caribflies and will be a valuable resource for gene isolation and genomic studies in tephritid insects.
authors.affiliation: USDA/ARS, Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology, 1700 SW 23rd Drive, Gainesville, FL 32608, USA. xaviern@ufl.edu
authors.forename: Xavier
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Nirmala
authors.forename: Marc F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Schetelig
authors.forename: Fahong
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Alfred M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Handler
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D016923:Cell Death; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D004625:Embryo, Nonmammalian / Q000378:metabolism; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D007313:Insecta / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D033621:Tephritidae / Q000166:cytology / Q000235:genetics* / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism