New approach for the study of mite physiology: a predatory mite transcriptome analysis

The study of mite physiology has been limited by several factors including their small size. Recently available molecular biology tools can offer a new perspective to the study of physiological processes in mites such as development and reproduction. Our objective was to obtain DNA sequence information from expressed genes from the predatory mite, Phytoseiulus persimilis. A cDNA library was constructed from immature and adult stages, and submitted for sequencing with the Roche 454 technology, using titanium reagents, available at NCSU. We obtained a total of 207 Mbp of sequence from 537,000 reads. The average size of the contigs was 935 bp and a total of 12,556 contigs were obtained. The gene ontology (GO) analysis indicated that 41% of the contigs appear to have a molecular function, 33% are involved in molecular processes and 26% are classified as cellular components. The significance of selected contigs will be discussed.