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Member Symposium

Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Down a Long and Winding Road: Tackling Insect Research Using Long Reads

Using HiFi sequencing to recover allelic diversity of silk proteins across Lepidoptera

Tuesday, November 12, 2024
9:17 AM – 9:35 AM MST
Location: Phoenix Convention Center, 226 A, PCC
Oral Presentation
Among Lepidoptera, silk has a wide range of uses at both the larval and pupal stages. These include making protective underwater covers, building cases out of twigs and lichen, leaf-rolling, tunnel building and the construction of a wide variety of cocoons. Commercial production of silk for over five thousand years has motivated recent research in studying the protein structure of silk in silkworms, with the primary protein being the large heavy-fibroin chain (H-fibroin) gene. H-fibroin is composed of several repeating motifs which form crystalline ꞵ-sheets, providing the strength and rigidity of silk. Despite the commercial importance of silk, and the wide variety of silk uses in the insect world, little is known about H-fibroin diversity outside of a few key species, as the high repeat content has historically made the sequencing and assembly of this gene challenging. Using 347 different species of Lepidoptera sequenced as part of the Darwin Tree of Life Project, we investigate allelic diversity and protein structure of H-fibroin across Lepidoptera. We found gene duplications in 22 species and additional introns in 13 species. TE annotations suggest the high number of introns found in some species are likely due to an ancestral LINE insertion event. We found large similarity in repeat content between haplotypes, but high allelic diversity around repeat boundaries. Together, these results uncover some of the hidden diversity within Lepidoptera silk protein sequences.