The assembled transcriptome of the adult horn fly, Haematobia irritans

The horn fly, Haematobia irritans irritans (Linnaeus, 1758; Diptera: Muscidae), a hematophagous external parasite of cattle, causes considerable economic losses to the livestock industry worldwide. This pest is mainly controlled with insecticides; however, horn fly populations from several countries have developed resistance to many of the products available for their control. In an attempt to better understand the adult horn fly and the development of resistance in natural populations, we used an Illumina paired-end read HiSeq and GAII approach to determine the transcriptomes of untreated control adult females, untreated control adult males, permethrin-treated surviving adult males and permethrin + piperonyl butoxide-treated killed adult males from a Louisiana population of horn flies with a moderate level of pyrethroid resistance. A total of 128,769,829, 127,276,458, 67,653,920, and 64,270,124 quality-filtered Illumina reads were obtained for untreated control adult females, untreated control adult males, permethrin-treated surviving adult males and permethrin + piperonyl butoxide-treated killed adult males, respectively. The de novo assemblies using CLC Genomics Workbench 8.0.1 yielded 15,699, 11,961, 2672, 7278 contigs (≥ 200 nt) for untreated control adult females, untreated control adult males, permethrin-treated surviving adult males and permethrin + piperonyl butoxide-treated killed adult males, respectively. More than 56% of the assembled contigs of each data set had significant hits in the BlastX (UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot database) (E <0.001). The number of contigs in each data set with InterProScan, GO mapping, Enzyme codes and KEGG pathway annotations were: Untreated Control Adult Females – 10,331, 8770, 2963, 2183; Untreated control adult males – 8392, 7056, 2449, 1765; Permethrin-treated surviving adult males – 1992, 1609, 641, 495; Permethrin + PBO-treated killed adult males – 5561, 4463, 1628, 1211.