High-Quality Assemblies for Three Invasive Social Wasps from the Vespula Genus

Abstract

Social wasps of the genus Vespula have spread to nearly all landmasses worldwide and have become significant pests in their introduced ranges, affecting economies and biodiversity. Comprehensive genome assemblies and annotations for these species are required to develop the next generation of control strategies and monitor existing chemical control. We sequenced and annotated the genomes of the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris), German wasp (Vespula germanica), and the western yellowjacket (Vespula pensylvanica). Our chromosome-level Vespula assemblies each contain 176-179 Mb of total sequence assembled into 25 scaffolds, with 10-200 unanchored scaffolds, and 16,566-18,948 genes. We annotated gene sets relevant to the applied management of invasive wasp populations, including genes associated with spermatogenesis and development, pesticide resistance, olfactory receptors, immunity and venom. These genomes provide evidence for active DNA methylation in Vespidae and tandem duplications of venom genes. Our genomic resources will contribute to the development of next-generation control strategies, and monitoring potential resistance to chemical control.

Expansion and accelerated evolution of 9-exon odorant receptors inPolistespaper wasps

“…Polistes (Harrop et al 2020). That analysis recovered less than half of the ORs reported here for Polistes, likely due to a lack of antennal transcriptome data, suggesting that hornets may have even larger OR repertoires than has been reported.…”

Chromosome-Level Genome Assembly Reveals Significant Gene Expansion in the Toll and IMD Signaling Pathways of Dendrolimus kikuchii

“…The explosive development of bioinformatics and highthroughput sequencing technologies, particularly the rise of the Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) and PacBio third-generation sequencing platforms (Senol Cali et al, 2019;Wick et al, 2019) and Hi-C technology (Servant et al, 2015;Zhuang et al, 2019), have facilitated the resolution of the challenges of high repetition and high heterozygosity in insect genome assembly in the past few years. Consequently, chromosome-level genome assemblies of many insects have been published (Harrop et al, 2020;Biello et al, 2021), providing abundant information and the foundations for research in areas such as fundamental insect biology, insectplant interactions and co-evolution, chemical ecology and insecticide resistance, comparative genomics and phylogenomics, detoxification metabolism, and ecological adaptations of the insects. Furthermore, the genome assemblies may illuminate potential targets for the development of nextgeneration control strategies and monitoring of potential resistance to chemical control.…”

A Diverse Viral Community from Predatory Wasps in Their Native and Invaded Range, with a New Virus Infectious to Honey Bees

“…BLASTn and BLASTx searches to a non-redundant database were then performed with resulting virus-like contigs to remove non-viral hits, such as host contigs that show similarity to viral sequences. All putative viral contigs were checked against the V. vulgaris genome [ 26 ] to ensure that all sequences were exogenous. To determine if the numbers of virus-like contigs differed between different life stages, we compared the mean rank of the contig number in each of the three life stages examined (larvae, workers, and gynes) with a Kruskal–Wallis test, followed by a pairwise Wilcoxon test with the Benjamini–Hochberg adjustment.…”

“…Wasps from the genus Vespula have a native Holarctic distribution [ 24 ]. They have successfully established across the globe, including more recently in South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand [ 25 , 26 ]. Vespula are voracious, opportunistic omnivores, preying on a diverse range of insects and scavenging invertebrate and vertebrate carcasses, supplementing these protein-rich sources with energy-rich honeydew and nectar [ 25 , 27 ].…”