Gomphocerus sibiricus Transcriptome or Gene expression. Gomphocerus sibiricus

The club-legged grasshopper Gomphocerus sibiricus is a Gomphocerinae grasshopper with a promising future as model species for studying the maintenance of colour-polymorphism, the genetics of sexual ornamentation and genome size evolution. However, limited molecular resources are so far available for this species. Here, we present a de novo transcriptome assembly as reference resource for gene expression studies. . We combined the best-assembled contigs from three different de novo transcriptome assemblers (Trinity, SOAPdenovo-trans and Oases/Velvet) into a single assembly. We identified a number of genes involved in pigmentation and green pigment metabolism pathways. Furthermore, we identified 76,221 putative single nucleotide polymorphisms residing in 8,400 contigs. We also assembled the mitochondrial genome and compared sequence divergence with other samples from the genus Gomphocerus. Finally, we also detected and assembled Wolbachia sequences, which revealed close sequence similarity to the strain pel wPip. Our study has generated a significant resource for uncovering genotype-phenotype associations in a species with an extraordinarily large genome, while also providing mitochondrial and Wolbachia sequences that will be useful for comparative studies.