38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Invertebrate Pathology

August 7-11, 2005  Anchorage, Alaska, U.S.A
   

Genomics approaches to insect-pathogen relationships in the spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana

Qili Feng1, Tim Ladd1, Sichun Zheng1, 2, Lan Li1, Dayu Zhang1,2, Debora Buhlers1, Peter J. Krell2, Basil M. Arif1, Arthur Retnakaran1
1Great Lakes Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service, 1219 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada P6A 2E5; 2Department of Microbiology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada N1G 2W1.

Genomics approaches, such as expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and microarrays, present a unique opportunity to study interaction of an insect and its parasites. More than 35,000 sequence reads have been generated from five cDNA libraries of the epidermis, midgut, fat body, whole larvae and cell line of the spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana. These ESTs have been assembled into approximately 8000 unigenes using Phrap program. Annotation of these sequences has been conducted against the protein database Swiss-Prot/TrEMBL and the GenBank of NCBI. The unique sequences have been classified for their molecular functions, cellular locations, and biological processes using Gene Ontology classification system. A spruce budworm EST database has been established. These annotated EST sequences serve as a resource base for gene mining, comparative analysis, and study of insect-virus interactions. DNA microarrays containing 3000 unigenes have been developed and used for analysis of global gene expression during development of the spruce budworm and the gene expression profiles in response to different stresses, such as virus infection. This project is supported by Genome Canada through the Ontario Genomics Institute and Canadian Biotechnology Strategy Fund.

This abstract may not be cited or reproduced.