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Student 10-Minute Paper

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Student Competition

Student

Grad Competition P-IE: Vectors of Plant Disease

Pest status, molecular evolution, and epigenetic factors derived from the genome assembly of Frankliniella fusca, a thysanopteran phytovirus vector

Monday, November 6, 2023
9:36 AM – 9:48 AM ET
Location: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Chesapeake 2
In-Person Student Competition
The tobacco thrips (Frankliniella fusca Hinds; family Thripidae; order Thysanoptera) is an important pest that can transmit viruses such as the tomato spotted wilt orthotospovirus to numerous economically important agricultural row crops and vegetables. Within the >7000 known thysanopteran species, the melon thrips (Thrips palmi Karny) and the western flower thrips (Frankliniella occidentalis Pergrande) are the only two thysanopteran species with assembled genomes. The final F. fusca assembly size was 370Mb with a single copy ortholog completeness of ~99% with respect to Insecta.
Analyses of sequence divergence between the two Frankliniella species’ genomes revealed substitution patterns consistent with positive selection in ~5% of the protein-coding genes with 1:1 orthologs. Several F. fusca genes related to virus infection possessed signatures of positive selection. Estimation of CpG depletion, a mutational consequence of DNA methylation, revealed that F. fusca genes that were downregulated and alternatively spliced in response to virus infection were preferentially targeted by DNA methylation. As in many other insects, DNA methylation was enriched in exons in Frankliniella, but gene copies with homology to DNA methyltransferase 3 were numerous and fragmented. This phenomenon seems to be relatively unique to thrips among other insect groups.