A whole transcriptome approach to investigate the genes involved in permethrin resistance in the Southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus

Illumina HiSeq 2000 was conducted on the mRNA fraction of fourth instar Cx. quinquefasciatus from a highly permethrin resistant strain (HAmCqG8) and its parental low resistance strain (HAmCqG0). After aligning reads to the Johannesburg genome using the GTF annotations file from Ensembl Metazoa, we found that 367 genes were upregulated in the high resistant strain and 3982 were downregulated. The upregulated genes were associated with cytochrome P450s and proteases while the downregulated genes were mostly found in the “no annotation” category for the Structural Classification of Proteins classifications for Cx. quinquefasciatus. This study identified the upregulated genes in the highly resistant HAmCqG8 strain that may be involved in resistance to permethrin. Overall design: RNA Seq profiling of the mRNA of fourth instar HAmCqG0 and HAmCqG8 Cx. quinquefasciatus (whole insect pooled samples)

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