Pyrosequencing the transcriptome of the Greenhouse whitefly reveals multiple messages encoding insecticide targets and detoxifying enzymes

The whitefly Trialeurodes vaporariorum is an economically important crop pest in temperate regions and has recently developed resistance to several important classes of insecticides. To date, the molecular mechanisms underlying resistance in this pest have not been characterised and progress has been hampered by the lack of sequence data available for this species. Here, we use pyrosequencing on the Roche 454-FLX platform to produce a substantial and annotated EST dataset. This unigene set will not only form a reference data set for digital transcriptomics but can also be for microarray design.