Dendroctonus ponderosae Genome sequencing

Bark beetles (Coleoptera: Scolytinae) are pests of many forests around the world. The mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, is a serious insect pest of Western North American pine forests. Increasingly, genome sequences of non-model organisms will require assembly from individual organisms lacking inbreeding to reduce heterozygosity, which presents a difficult challenge in genome assembly. We present a draft de novo genome of this major forest insect pest assembled from Illumina paired-end short-insert sequencing reads of genome DNA from an individual field-collected pupa and scaffolded with Illumina mate-pair sequencing reads of genomic DNA from pooled field-collected pupae, paired-end short-insert whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing reads of mRNA from adult beetle tissues, and paired-end Sanger EST sequences from various life stages. The resources we have developed in the mountain pine beetle provide the second reference genome in Coleoptera, the first for a forest insect pest, and can inform research in areas such as gene discovery; functional and population genomics; and comparative analyses in this and other Dendroctonus species and more generally to Scolytinae and other Coleoptera.