Bulbul Ahmed

The natural gift, shellac, mainly grown in south east Asian countries, is the resinous substance produce by Lac insect (Kerria lacca). It has wide applications in surface coating industry, adhesive industry, electrical industry, pharmaceutical industry, confectionery industry, cosmetics industry etc. The paired end Illumina data of Kerria lacca of four stages, viz., larva, crawlers, fertilized female and adult stages from public domain were used for identification of differentially expressed genes at different stages of lac insect along with their annotation. De novo assembly was done using trinity, followed by abundance estimation and identification of differentially expressed genes. Assembly resulted in 157017 contigs and N50 value of 1374bp. All pair-wise combinations of stages were made to identify the differentially expressed genes. Further, stage specific differentially expressed genes were identified on the basis of fold change value and p-value less than 0.05. At all the four stages, 40 signature differentially expressed genes were identified. 3, 7, 20 and 3 pathways were identified at larva, crawlers, fertilized female and adult stages, respectively. A total of 80,761 SSRs, 110289 SNPs and 10657 Indels were also identified from all the four combined stages. The genomic enrichment of lac insect in terms of markers’ discovery, stage specific genes, and pathway studies targeting commercially important bio-molecules from this study would be useful for lac breeders. Our study report the first massive genomic resource for lac. Since the whole genome of lac insect is not available, the findings of this study will supplement the genomic information of whole genome sequencing in future.