Pieris rapae Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly

Agricultural environments have long presented an opportunity to study evolution in action, and genomic approaches are opening doors for testing hypotheses about adaptation to crops, pesticides, and fertilizers. We seek to develop genetic resources for the cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) to test questions about adaptation to novel, agricultural environments. We focus on a population in the north central United States as a unique case study: here, canola, a host plant, has been grown during the entire flight period of the butterfly over the last three decades.