Full Text

Turn on search term navigation

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Canegrubs (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) are major pests of sugarcane crops in Australia, but despite long-term and intensive research, no commercially viable biological control agents have been identified. We used the RNA-Seq approach to explore the viriomes of three different species of canegrubs from central Queensland, Australia to identify potential candidates for biological control. We identified six novel RNA viruses, characterized their genomes, and inferred their evolutionary relationships with other closely related viruses. These novel viruses showed similarity to other known members from picornaviruses, benyviruses, sobemoviruses, totiviruses, and reoviruses. The abundance of viral reads varied in these libraries; for example, Dermolepida albohirtum picorna-like virus (9696 nt) was built from 83,894 assembled reads while only 1350 reads mapped to Lepidiota negatoria beny-like virus (6371 nt). Future studies are essential to determine their natural incidence in different life stages of the host, biodiversity, geographical distributions, and potential as biological control agents for these important pests of sugarcane.

Details

Title
Transcriptomics Reveal Several Novel Viruses from Canegrubs (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) in Central Queensland, Australia
Author
Etebari, Kayvan 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Lenancker, Pauline 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Powell, Kevin S 2 ; Furlong, Michael J 1 

 School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia; [email protected] 
 Sugar Research Australia, 71378 Bruce Highway, Gordonvale, QLD 4865, Australia; [email protected] (P.L.); [email protected] (K.S.P.) 
First page
649
Publication year
2022
Publication date
2022
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
19994915
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2642670175
Copyright
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.