4.6 Article

Plant-herbivorous insect networks: who is eating what revealed by long barcodes using high-throughput sequencing and Trinity assembly

Journal

INSECT SCIENCE
Volume 28, Issue 1, Pages 127-143

Publisher

WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1744-7917.12749

Keywords

high-throughput sequencing; host plants; insect network; metabarcoding; phytophagous insects

Categories

Funding

  1. China National Funds for Distinguished Young Scientists [31425023]
  2. Natural Science Foundation of China [31772501]
  3. Support Project of High-level Teachers in Beijing Municipal Universities [IDHT20180518]
  4. Academy for Multidisciplinary Studies, Capital Normal University
  5. Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University [IRT_17R75]

Ask authors/readers for more resources

The study presents a fast and effective sequencing strategy for identifying larvae of Lepidoptera and their diets, with high-quality sequences obtained through long-multiplex-metabarcoding. The SHMMT approach is shown to be reliable and cost-effective, with accurate identification of larvae diets. This new method will facilitate research on insect-plant networks.
Interactions between plants and insects are among the most important life functions for all organism at a particular natural community. Usually a large number of samples are required to identify insect diets in food web studies. Previously, Sanger sequencing and next generation sequencing (NGS) with short DNA barcodes were used, resulting in low species-level identification; meanwhile the costs of Sanger sequencing are expensive for metabarcoding together with more samples. Here, we present a fast and effective sequencing strategy to identify larvae of Lepidoptera and their diets at the same time without increasing the cost on Illumina platform in a single HiSeq run, with long-multiplex-metabarcoding (COI for insects, rbcL, matK, ITS and trnL for plants) obtained by Trinity assembly (SHMMT). Meanwhile, Sanger sequencing (for single individuals) and NGS (for polyphagous) were used to verify the reliability of the SHMMT approach. Furthermore, we show that SHMMT approach is fast and reliable, with most high-quality sequences of five DNA barcodes of 63 larvae individuals (54 species) recovered (full length of 100% of the COI gene and 98.3% of plant DNA barcodes) using Trinity assembly (up-sized to 1015 bp). For larvae diets identification, 95% are reliable; the other 5% failed because their guts were empty. The diets identified by SHMMT approach are 100% consistent with the host plants that the larvae were feeding on during our collection. Our study demonstrates that SHMMT approach is reliable and cost-effective for insect-plants network studies. This will facilitate insect-host plant studies that generally contain a huge number of samples.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.6
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available