Dendroctonus ponderosae (Mountain pine beetle) Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Dendroctonus ponderosae

Dendroctonus ponderosae, the mountain pine beetle, is a destructive pest of pine trees in increasingly large regions of North America [1]. It has a hard black exoskeleton, and measures approximately 5 millimetres, about the size of a grain of rice. The beetle carries blue-stain fungus (Grosmannia clavigera [2]), a symbiont that enables the beetles to extract nutrients from the tree. Infestation by many beetles (which coordinate attacks with pheromones) can be fatal to the tree because the fungus produces filaments that block water transport. The Tria project provides genomic resources for the mountain pine beetle, blue-stain fungus, pine tree, and related-species, to assist researchers in understanding the ecological dynamics of these species.

The mountain pine beetle is the second coleopteran genome to be sequenced (the other is Tribolium castaneum), and provides a valuable comparative resource for this inordinately speciose order.

Picture credit: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons (Image source)

Taxonomy ID 77166

More information General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia

Assembly

The assembly presented here has been imported from INSDC and is linked to the assembly accession [GCA_000355655.1].

The total length of the assembly is 252847629 bp contained within 8188 scaffolds. The scaffold N50 value is 628732, the scaffold L50 value is 87. Assembly gaps span 51025767 bp. The GC% content of the assembly is 36.0%.

Annotation

Ensembl Metazoa displaying genes imported from NCBI RefSeq annotation release v100. Small RNA features, protein features, BLAST hits and cross-references have been computed by Ensembl Metazoa.

References

1. Draft genome of the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, a major forest pest.
   Keeling CI, Yuen MM, Liao NY, Docking TR, Chan SK, Taylor GA, Palmquist DL, Jackman SD, Nguyen A, Li M et al. 2013. Genome Biology. 14:R27.
2. De novo genome sequence assembly of a filamentous fungus using Sanger, 454 and Illumina sequence data.
   Diguistini S, Liao NY, Platt D, Robertson G, Seidel M, Chan SK, Docking TR, Birol I, Holt RA, Hirst M et al. 2009. Genome Biology. 10:R94.