Trichoplusia ni genome sequence

The cabbage looper, Trichoplusia ni (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) is a generalist herbivorous insect with a host range of over 160 plant species from 36 families. Its geographic distribution covers all continents where crucifer crops are cultivated. As a highly polyphagous noctuid generalist and an important agricultural pest, T. ni is widely used for studying fundamental insect physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology, insect-plant interactions and insect chemical ecology, and insect-microbe interactions and insect pathology. In addition, T. ni has also been used as a herbovirous insect to investigate effects of environmental contanimants on agricultural ecosystems and to study tritrophic interactions among host plants, insects and microbes. T. ni is the standard species for titration of insecticidal potencies of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) products, the most widely used biopesticides, to define the international units of Bt potency in industry, and the cell lines TN-368 and High Five (BTI-Tn-5B1-4) established from T. ni have been the most widely used insect cell lines for insect virus infection and recombinant protein expression for fundamental and applied biological research and industrial protein production.

We assembled a high-quality chromosome-level reference genome sequence of T. ni. The genome assembly is described in the following paper:

Chen W, Yang X, Tetreau G, Song X, Coutu C, Hegedus D, Blissard G, Fei Z, Wang P (2019) A high-quality chromosome-level genome assembly of a generalist herbivore, Trichoplusia ni. Molecular Ecology Resources 19:485-496