The pygmy grasshopper Tetrix japonica is a common insect distributed throughout the world, and it has the potential for use as a model species in studies of body color polymorphism, genomics and the biology of Tetrigoidea (Insecta: Orthoptera). However, limited biological information is available for this insect. Here, we conducted a de novo transcriptome study of T. japonica to provide a better understanding of its gene expression and develop genomic resources for future work. We sequenced and explored the characteristics of the de novo transcriptome of T. japonica using highthroughput sequencing on an Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform.. A total of 107,608,206 paired-end clean reads were assembled into 64,141 unigenes using Trinity software; the mean unigene size was 771 bp, and the N50 length was 1,238 bp. A total of 29,225 unigenes were functionally annotated to the NCBI non redundant protein sequences (Nr), NCBI non-redundant nucleotide sequences (Nt), a manuall annotated and reviewed protein sequence database (Swiss-Prot), Gen Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases. A large number of putative genes that are potentially involved in pigment pathways, juvenile hormone (JH) metabolism and signaling pathways were identified in the T. japonica transcriptome. Additionally, 65,769 and 156,796 putative single nucleotide polymorphisms occurred in the adult and larvae transcriptomes, respectively, and a total of 3,126 simple sequence repeats were detected in this assembly. This comprehensive transcriptomic data for T. japonica will provide a usable resource for gene predictions, signaling pathway investigations, and molecular marker development for this species and other pygmy grasshoppers.
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