Comparison of the intestinal metagenome of red palm weevil, Rhynchophorus ferrugineus

It is known that in Middle East red palm weevil (RPW) is harmful to date palm by consuming fibrous tissues, but the important symbiotic role of its gut microbiome in is poorly understood. Here we have performed a study on RPW gut microbial flora by applying parallel pyrosequencing using a Roche/454 Genome sequencer FLX Titanium. Totally, four samples had been used to construct shotgun libraries, among which tens of RPW larval individuals were collected on farms in Hofuf, Saudi Arabia in March, July and November (L-3, L-7 and L-11), and adult ones in March and May (A-S) were pooled together as the contrast. Furthermore, amplicon pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA partial fragemnt was used to verify the impact of temperature on gut microbiota (L-HT vs L-LT) and get a snapshot of gut microbiota at different rearing ages in lab (L-M0.5, L-M1, L-M1.5 and L-M2).