Abstract:
BACKGROUND: At the time of publication, the most devastating desert
locust crisis in decades is affecting East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula
and South-West Asia. The situation is extremely alarming in East
Africa, where Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia face an unprecedented
threat to food security and livelihoods. Most of the time, however,
locusts do not occur in swarms, but live as relatively harmless solitary
insects. The phenotypically distinct solitarious and gregarious locust
phases differ markedly in many aspects of behaviour, physiology and
morphology, making them an excellent model to study how
environmental factors shape behaviour and development. A better
understanding of the extreme phenotypic plasticity in desert locusts
will offer new, more environmentally sustainable ways of fighting
devastating swarms.
METHODS: High molecular weight DNA derived from two adult males
was used for Mate Pair and Paired End Illumina sequencing and
PacBio sequencing. A reliable reference genome of Schistocerca
gregaria was assembled using the ABySS pipeline, scaffolding was
improved using LINKS.
RESULTS: In total, 1,316 Gb Illumina reads and 112 Gb PacBio reads were produced and assembled. The resulting draft genome consists
of 8,817,834,205 bp organised in 955,015 scaffolds with an N50 of
157,705 bp, making the desert locust genome the largest insect
genome sequenced and assembled to date. In total, 18,815 proteinencoding genes are predicted in the desert locust genome, of which
13,646 (72.53%) obtained at least one functional assignment based on
similarity to known proteins.
CONCLUSIONS: The desert locust genome data will contribute greatly to
studies of phenotypic plasticity, physiology, neurobiology, molecular
ecology, evolutionary genetics and comparative genomics, and will
promote the desert locust’s use as a model system. The data will also
facilitate the development of novel, more sustainable strategies for
preventing or combating swarms of these infamous insects.
