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ViewAttendees 10

P-IE

Student Competition 10-Minute Paper

Grad 10-min: P-IE, Molecular and Novel Tools

Building a reference genome for tobacco thrips (Frankliniella fusca)

On-Demand
Student Competition On-Demand
The tobacco thrips (Frankliniella fusca Hinds) is an important agricultural pest that transmits the Tomato Spotted Wilt Tospovirus (TSWV) to peanuts, tomatoes, onions, and cottons in Georgia and surrounding areas. The aim of this project is to determine the genetic foundation of this insect by using current sequencing technology. Here we present the steps being made to build a draft genome using PacBio and Illumina sequence data. We use extracted DNA from a large sample size of thrips consisting of inbred individuals as the input to reduce any potential downstream alignment errors due to heterozygosity. With the use of specialized bioinformatics tools, this assembly will be done in a hybrid approach to minimize errors associated with long reads, by way of correction with short reads. Until now, the main molecular resolution we have of the tobacco thrips comes from the transcriptomic level. With an assembled genome, this will allow for further exploration into the molecular workings of these organisms by increasing confidence in mapped reads.