Candidate chemosensory genes in female antennae of the noctuid moth Spodoptera littoralis.

Emmanuelle Jacquin-Joly (1) , Fabrice Legeai (2, 3) , Nicolas Montagné (1) , Christelle Monsempes (1) , Marie-Christine François (1) , Julie Poulain (4) , Frédérick F. Gavory (5) , William B Walker (6) , Bill S Hansson (7) , Mattias C Larsson (6)

1 PISC - Physiologie de l'Insecte : Signalisation et Communication
2 IGEPP - Institut de Génétique, Environnement et Protection des Plantes
3 GenScale - Scalable, Optimized and Parallel Algorithms for Genomics
4 GENOSCOPE - Genoscope - Centre national de séquençage [Evry]
5 UMR 8030 - Génomique métabolique
6 Department of Plant Protection Biology
7 Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology [Jena]

Chemical senses are crucial for all organisms to detect various environmental information. Different protein families, expressed in chemosensory organs, are involved in the detection of this information, such as odorant-binding proteins, olfactory and gustatory receptors, and ionotropic receptors. We recently reported an Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) approach on male antennae of the noctuid moth, Spodoptera littoralis, with which we could identify a large array of chemosensory genes in a species for which no genomic data are available.Here we describe a complementary EST project on female antennae in the same species. 18,342 ESTs were sequenced and their assembly with our previous male ESTs led to a total of 13,685 unigenes, greatly improving our description of the S. littoralis antennal transcriptome. Gene ontology comparison between male and female data suggested a similar complexity of antennae of both sexes. Focusing on chemosensation, we identified 26 odorant-binding proteins, 36 olfactory and 5 gustatory receptors, expressed in the antennae of S. littoralis. One of the newly identified gustatory receptors appeared as female-enriched. Together with its atypical tissue-distribution, this suggests a role in oviposition. The compilation of male and female antennal ESTs represents a valuable resource for exploring the mechanisms of olfaction in S. littoralis.

Mots clés: olfactory receptor; gustatory receptor; odorant-binding protein; expressed sequence tag

Mots clés: lepidoptera; spodoptera littoralis

Domaines: Bio-informatique [q-bio.QM]; Bio-Informatique, Biologie Systémique [q-bio.QM]

Emmanuelle Jacquin-Joly, Fabrice Legeai, Nicolas Montagné, Christelle Monsempes, Marie-Christine François, et al.. Candidate chemosensory genes in female antennae of the noctuid moth Spodoptera littoralis.. International Journal of Biological Sciences, 2012, 8 (7), pp.1036-50. ⟨10.7150/ijbs.4469⟩. ⟨hal-00753414⟩