Melitaea cinxia transcriptome project. Melitaea cinxia

Melitaea cinxia. Melitaea cinxia has been studied extensively in regard to its ecology and metapopulation biology. See "On the Wings of Checkerspots" by P. R. Ehrlich & I. Hanski, Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. Next-generation sequencing (454 Life Science Technology) was used to characterize thousands of expressed genes in the butterfly, Melitaea cinxia, a species that has been studied extensively for its metapopulation ecology but had few genetic data available for mechanistic study. Sequences are being used to locate SNPs and to construct an oligonucleotide microarray to examine how gene expression relates to polymorphic traits such as dispersal ability. Reads and annotated transcript assemblies are available for searching at cinxiabase. The DNA for this study was normalized cDNA from whole larvae, pupae, and adults collected in Aland, Finland.