Dataset Information

Complete genome of Pieris rapae, a resilient alien, a cabbage pest, and a source of anti-cancer proteins.

ABSTRACT: The Small Cabbage White ( Pieris rapae) is originally a Eurasian butterfly. Being accidentally introduced into North America, Australia, and New Zealand a century or more ago, it spread throughout the continents and rapidly established as one of the most abundant butterfly species. Although it is a serious pest of cabbage and other mustard family plants with its caterpillars reducing crops to stems, it is also a source of pierisin, a protein unique to the Whites that shows cytotoxicity to cancer cells. To better understand the unusual biology of this omnipresent agriculturally and medically important butterfly, we sequenced and annotated the complete genome from USA specimens. At 246 Mbp, it is among the smallest Lepidoptera genomes reported to date. While 1.5% positions in the genome are heterozygous, they are distributed highly non-randomly along the scaffolds, and nearly 20% of longer than 1000 base-pair segments are SNP-free (median length: 38000 bp). Computational simulations of population evolutionary history suggest that American populations started from a very small number of introduced individuals, possibly a single fertilized female, which is in agreement with historical literature. Comparison to other Lepidoptera genomes reveals several unique families of proteins that may contribute to the unusual resilience of Pieris. The nitrile-specifier proteins divert the plant defense chemicals to non-toxic products. The apoptosis-inducing pierisins could offer a defense mechanism against parasitic wasps. While only two pierisins from Pieris rapae were characterized before, the genome sequence revealed eight, offering additional candidates as anti-cancer drugs. The reference genome we obtained lays the foundation for future studies of the Cabbage White and other Pieridae species.

SUBMITTER: Shen J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5247789 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Complete genome of <i>Pieris rapae</i>, a resilient alien, a cabbage pest, and a source of anti-cancer proteins.

Shen Jinhui J Cong Qian Q Kinch Lisa N LN Borek Dominika D Otwinowski Zbyszek Z Grishin Nick V NV

F1000Research 20161103

The Small Cabbage White ( <i>Pieris rapae</i>) is originally a Eurasian butterfly. Being accidentally introduced into North America, Australia, and New Zealand a century or more ago, it spread throughout the continents and rapidly established as one of the most abundant butterfly species. Although it is a serious pest of cabbage and other mustard family plants with its caterpillars reducing crops to stems, it is also a source of pierisin, a protein unique to the Whites that shows cytotoxicity to ...[more]

PMID: 28163896

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Project description:BackgroundAgricultural environments have long presented an opportunity to study evolution in action, and genomic approaches are opening doors for testing hypotheses about adaptation to crops, pesticides, and fertilizers. Here, we begin to develop the cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) as a system to test questions about adaptation to novel, agricultural environments. We focus on a population in the north central United States as a unique case study: here, canola, a host plant, has been grown during the entire flight period of the butterfly over the last three decades.ResultsFirst, we show that the agricultural population has diverged phenotypically relative to a nonagricultural population: when reared on a host plant distantly related to canola, the agricultural population is smaller and more likely to go into diapause than the nonagricultural population. Second, drawing from deep sequencing runs from six individuals from the agricultural population, we assembled the gut transcriptome of this population. Then, we sequenced RNA transcripts from the midguts of 96 individuals from this canola agricultural population and the nonagricultural population in order to describe patterns of genomic divergence between the two. While population divergence is low, 235 genes show evidence of significant differentiation between populations. These genes are significantly enriched for cofactor and small molecule metabolic processes, and many genes also have transporter or catalytic activity. Analyses of population structure suggest the agricultural population contains a subset of the genetic variation in the nonagricultural population.ConclusionsTaken together, our results suggest that adaptation of cabbage whites to an agricultural environment occurred at least in part through selection on standing genetic variation. Both the phenotypic and genetic data are consistent with the idea that this pest has adapted to an abundant and predictable agricultural resource through a narrowing of niche breadth and loss of genetic variants rather than de novo gain of adaptive alleles. The present research develops genomic resources to pave the way for future studies using cabbage whites as a model contributing to our understanding of adaptation to agricultural environments.

Dataset Information

Complete genome of Pieris rapae, a resilient alien, a cabbage pest, and a source of anti-cancer proteins.

Publications

Complete genome of <i>Pieris rapae</i>, a resilient alien, a cabbage pest, and a source of anti-cancer proteins.

Similar Datasets

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