Transcriptome analysis of developmental stages of cocoa pod borer, Conopomorpha cramerella: A polyphagous insect pest of economic importance in Southeast Asia.

Objective: To provide genetic resources for future research on developing RNAi as a strategy for management of this pest Methods: We sequenced the transcriptome of C. cramerella representing the three stages of development, larva, pupa and adult moth using Illumina NovaSeq6000. Transcriptome assembly was performed by Trinity for all the samples. Results: A total number of 147,356,088 high quality reads were obtained. Of these, 285,882 contigs were assembled. The mean contig size was 374 bp. Additionally, we identified a number of genes that are involved in reproduction and development such as genes involved in general function processes in the insect. Genes found to be involved in reproduction such as porin, dsx, bol and fruitless were associated with sex determination, spermatogenesis and pheromone binding. Conclusions: The transcriptomes data would be a valuable genetic resource for identification of genes in C. cramerella and the study will provide putative targets for RNAi pest control. Overall design: Transcriptome analysis of three developmental stages of cocoa pod borer, Conopomorpha cramerella were done by deep sequencing using Illumina NovaSeq6000. Transcriptome assembly was performed by Trinity for all the samples. Protein coding sequence (CDS) was extracted from the reconstructed transcripts by TransDecoder. Subsequently, BlastX and InterProScan were applied for homology search to make a prediction of the function of CDS in unigene.