De novo intestine-specific transcriptome of the brown planthopper Nilaparvata lugens revealed potential functions in digestion, detoxification and immune response

Abstract The brown planthopper ( Nilaparvata lugens , BPH) is the most serious rice plant pests in Asia. In this study, we performed transcriptome-wide analysis on BPH intestine. We obtained more than 26 million sequencing reads that were then assembled into 53,553 unigenes with a mean size of 388 bp. Based on similarity search with the nucleotide sequences available at NCBI, BPH intestine-specific transcriptome analysis identified 21,405 sequences. Assembled sequences were annotated with gene description, gene ontology and clusters of orthologous group terms. The digestion-, defense- and xenobiotic metabolism-related genes were abundantly detected in the transcripts from BPH intestine. Many novel genes including 33 digestion-related genes, 25 immune responsive genes and 27 detoxification-related genes are first reported here. We investigated the gene expression patterns at the transcript levels in different tissues by quantitative real-time PCR analysis, which revealed that some genes had intestine-specific expression, implicating their potential significance for BPH management.