title: De novo assembly and transcriptome analysis of the Mediterranean fruit fly Ceratitis capitata early embryos.
abstract: The agricultural pest Ceratitis capitata, also known as the Mediterranean fruit fly or Medfly, belongs to the Tephritidae family, which includes a large number of other damaging pest species. The Medfly has been the first non-drosophilid fly species which has been genetically transformed paving the way for designing genetic-based pest control strategies. Furthermore, it is an experimentally tractable model, in which transient and transgene-mediated RNAi have been successfully used. We applied Illumina sequencing to total RNA preparations of 8-10 hours old embryos of C. capitata, This developmental window corresponds to the blastoderm cellularization stage. In summary, we assembled 42,614 transcripts which cluster in 26,319 unique transcripts of which 11,045 correspond to protein coding genes; we identified several hundreds of long ncRNAs; we found an enrichment of transcripts encoding RNA binding proteins among the highly expressed transcripts, such as CcTRA-2, known to be necessary to establish and, most likely, to maintain female sex of C. capitata. Our study is the first de novo assembly performed for Ceratitis capitata based on Illumina NGS technology during embryogenesis and it adds novel data to the previously published C. capitata EST databases. We expect that it will be useful for a variety of applications such as gene cloning and phylogenetic analyses, as well as to advance genetic research and biotechnological applications in the Medfly and other related Tephritidae.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Salvemini
authors.affiliation: Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India.
authors.forename: Kallare P
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Arunkumar
authors.affiliation: Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India.
authors.forename: Javaregowda
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nagaraju
authors.affiliation: Stazione Zoologica "Anton Dohrn", Naples, Italy.
authors.forename: Remo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sanges
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
authors.forename: Valeria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Petrella
authors.affiliation: Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India.
authors.forename: Archana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tomar
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology and Institute of Urban and Horticultural Pests, College of Plant Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Hongyu
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology and Institute of Urban and Horticultural Pests, College of Plant Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Weiwei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Saccone
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D033622:Ceratitis capitata / Q000196:embryology* / Q000235:genetics* / Q000502:physiology; D059006:Chromosomes, Insect / Q000235:genetics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D004625:Embryo, Nonmammalian / Q000378:metabolism*; D005260:Female; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D017344:Genes, Insect / Q000235:genetics; D008297:Male; D017421:Sequence Analysis; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D019849:Sex Determination Processes / Q000235:genetics; D014998:Y Chromosome / Q000235:genetics