Abstract

Acanthaspis cincticrus (Stål) is an assassin bug with a specialized camouflaging behavior to ambush ants in the nymphal stages. In this study, we comprehensively sequenced all the life stages of A. cincticrus, including the eggs, five nymph instars, female and male adults using Illumina HiSeq technology. We obtained 176 million clean sequence reads. The assembled 84,055 unigenes were annotated and classified functionally based on protein databases. Among the unigenes, 29.03% were annotated by one or more databases, suggesting their well-conserved functions. Comparison of the gene expression profiles in the egg, nymph and adult stages revealed certain bias. Functional enrichment analysis of significantly differentially expressed genes (SDEGs) showed positive correlation with specific physiological processes within each stage, including venom, aggression, olfactory recognition as well as growth and development. Relative expression of ten SDEGs involved in predation process was validated using quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR).

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-4-2017

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Scientific Reports, v. 7, article no. 12691, p. 1-11.

© The Author(s) 2017

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-12978-0

Funding Information

This work was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB127600), the National Key Technology R & D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology (No. 2012BAD19B00) and the Special Fund for Scientific Research (No. 2012FY111100).

Related Content

Supplementary information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-12978-0.

41598_2017_12978_MOESM1_ESM.xls (6817 kB)
Dataset 1

41598_2017_12978_MOESM2_ESM.pdf (1072 kB)
Supplementary information

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