Sequencing, De Novo Assembly and Annotation of the Colorado Potato Beetle, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, Transcriptome

Background. The Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) is a major pest and a serious threat to potato cultivation throughout the northern hemisphere. Despite its high importance for invasion biology, phenology and pest management, little is known about L. decemlineata from a genomic perspective. We subjected European L. decemlineata adult and larval transcriptome samples to 454-FLX massively-parallel DNA sequencing to characterize a basal set of genes from this species. We created a combined assembly of the adult and larval datasets including the publicly available midgut larval Roche 454 reads and provided basic annotation. We were particularly interested in diapause-specific g…