The first tarnished plant bug transcriptome: searching for new insecticidal targets

The tarnished plant bug, Lygus lineolaris (Palisot de Beauvois), is the most common and abundant mirid species in North America. This insect is a generalist herbivore and often becomes a pest, threatening more than 100 crops of economic importance. Although it impacts many crops, its importance is most frequently noticed in cotton production. After the introduction of transgenic Bt cotton, lepidopteran pests were essentially eliminated and pierce-sucking insects, such as the tarnished plant bug, emerged as new pests. Due to widespread resistance and other factors, cotton control costs and yield losses have been increasing considerably. As a result finding and utilizing new insecticide targets are necessary to prevent yield losses caused by this destructive pest. The first 454 transcriptome from gut and whole body of the tarnished plant bug was constructed as an attempt to find such targets. It was obtained 229919 reads (3549 contigs) from the gut library and 292714 (5529 contigs) reads from the whole body library. In total we obtained 116,635,527 bases of data. The data was organized according to the Gene Ontology (GO) and contigs in different categories were selected as potential targets to control this pest. The feasibility of these targets will be further evaluated later. A transgenic approach may be developed to control this pest in the future, which may change pest management completely as Bt changed lepidopteran pest management.