Abstract: 【Aim】 This study aims to establish the antennal transcriptome database of female and male adults of Megabruchidius dorsalis and explore olfaction-related genes. 【Methods】The high-throughput sequencing platform Illumina HiSeq was used to perform antennal transcriptome sequencing, sequence assembly, functional annotation and differentially expressed gene analysis of female and male adults of M. dorsalis. The expression levels of some highly expressed genes in the antennae of female and male adults of M. dorsalis were assayed and confirmed by qRT-PCR. 【Results】A total of 42 053 unigenes with the N50 length of 2 066 bp were obtained from the antennal transcriptome of female and male adults of M. dorsalis. A total of 18 039 unigenes (43.57%) were annotated against six major public databases NR, Swiss-Prot, Pfam, eggNOG, GO and KEGG, among them the largest number of unigenes (17 687) were annotated into the NR database, and the minimum number of unigenes (9 779) were annotated into the KEGG database. By further functional annotation and identification, 183 candidate olfaction-related genes of M. dorsalis including 25 odorant binding protein (OBP) genes, three chemosensory protein (CSP) genes, 126 odorant receptor (OR) genes (including 125 typical OR genes and one atypical OR gene), eight ionotropic receptor (IR) genes, 18 gustatory receptor (GR) genes and three sensory neuron membrane protein (SNMP) genes were identified. After comparison of the antennal transcriptome of female and male adults, 357 differentially expressed genes including eight OR genes and one IR gene were screened. Of the 357 differentially expressed genes, 152 genes were highly expressed in the antennae of females and 205 in the antennae of males. In addition, qRT-PCR results showed that six olfaction-related genes (MdorCSP3, MdorIR2, MdorIR6, MdorGR10, MdorSNMP2 and MdorSNMP3) were highly expressed in the female adult antennae of M. dorsalis, while four olfaction-related genes (MdorOBP15, MdorOBP22, MdorORco and MdorGR8) were highly expressed in the male adult antennae.【Conclusion】 In this study, we obtained the antennal transcriptome data of adult M. dorsalis, and identified the candidate genes related to olfaction. The results have laid a molecular foundation for the further study of the gene function and olfactory sensing mechanism of M. dorsalis.-

Key words: Megabruchidius dorsalis, antennal transcriptome, highthroughput sequencing, olfaction-related genes, qRT-PCR