title: Analysis of the transcriptome of blowfly Chrysomya megacephala (Fabricius) larvae in responses to different edible oils.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Chrysomya megacephala (Fabricius), a prevalent necrophagous blowfly that is easily mass reared, is noted for being a mechanical vector of pathogenic microorganisms, a pollinator of numerous crops, and a resource insect in forensic investigation in the postmortem interval. In the present study, in order to comprehensively understand the physiological and biochemical functions of C. megacephala, we performed RNA-sequencing and digital gene expression (DGE) profiling using Solexa/Illumina sequencing technology.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A total of 39,098,662 clean reads were assembled into 27,588 unigenes with a mean length of 768 nt. All unigenes were searched against the Nt database, Nr database, Swiss-Prot, Cluster of Orthologous Groups (COG) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genome (KEGG) with the BLASTn or BLASTx algorithm (E-value<0.00001) for annotations. In total, 7,081 unigenes and 14,099 unigenes were functionally classified into 25 COG categories and 240 KEGG pathways, respectively. Furthermore, 20,216 unigenes were grouped into 48 sub-categories belonging to 3 main Gene Ontology (GO) categories (ontologies). Using the transcriptome data as references, we analyzed the differential gene expressions between a soybean oil-fed group (SOF) and a lard oil-fed group (LOF), compared to the negative control group (NC), using the DGE approach. We finally obtained 1,566 differentially expressed genes in SOF/NC, and 1,099 genes in LOF/NC. For further analysis, GO and KEGG functional enrichment were performed on all differentially expressed genes, and a group of differentially expressed candidate genes related to lipometabolism were identified.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This study provides a global survey of C. megacephala and provides the basis for further research on the functional genomics of this insect.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory for Biological Control/Institute of Entomology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Yanyan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Chao
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Xinjun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Guren
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D004041:Dietary Fats / Q000494:pharmacology*; D004175:Diptera / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000235:genetics*; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D017344:Genes, Insect / Q000235:genetics; D007814:Larva / Q000187:drug effects / Q000235:genetics; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D017423:Sequence Analysis, RNA; D013024:Soybean Oil / Q000494:pharmacology*
chemical_list: D004041:Dietary Fats; D013024:Soybean Oil; C029310:lard