Global Transcriptional Analysis of Olfactory Genes in the Head of Pine Shoot Beetle, Tomicus yunnanensis

The most important proteins involved in olfaction include odorant binding protein (OBP), chemosensory protein (CSP), olfactory receptor (OR), and gustatory receptor (GR). Despite that the exhaustive genomic analysis has revealed a large number of olfactory genes in a number of model insects, it is still poorly understood for most nonmodel species. This is mostly due to the reason that the small antenna is challenging for collection. We can generally isolate one or few genes at a time by means of the traditional method. Here, we present the large-scale identifying members of the main olfactory genes from the head of Tomicus yunnanensis using Illumina sequencing. In a single run, we obtained over 51.8 million raw reads. These reads were assembled into 57,142 unigenes. Nearly 29,384 of them were functionally annotated in the NCBI nonredundant database. By depth analysis of the data, 11 OBPs, 8 CSPs, 18 ORs, and 8 GRs were retrieved. Sequences encoding full length proteins were further characterised for one OBP and two CSPs. The obtained olfactory genes provide a major resource in further unraveling the molecular mechanisms of T. yunnanensis chemoperception. This study indicates that the next generation sequencing is an attractive approach for efficient identification of olfactory genes from insects, for which the genome sequence is unavailable.