Draft Genome of the Globally Widespread Whitefly Bemisia tabaci

Bemisia tabaci is a phloem-feeding insect that lives predominantly on herbaceous species. It is a considerable pest of ornamental, vegetable, grain, legume, and cotton crops, causing damage directly through feeding and indirectly through the transmission of plant pathogenic viruses, primarily begomoviruses. It causes severe crop losses which will likely continue to increase, resulting in higher pesticide usage on many crops (including tomatoes, beans, cassava, cotton, cucurbits, potatoes, sweetpotatoes). It is important to develop biological methods to control whitefly infestations. Surprisingly, little is known about the genome of whiteflies. Here we report the draft genome sequence of B. tabaci biotype B (=MEAM1). Using an isogenic colony of whitefly developed at USDA-ARS in Charleston, SC, over 6,000 haploid male individuals were collected and used for genomic DNA extraction. Three paired-end libraries with insert sizes of 300 bp, 500 bp and 1 Kb, and three mate-pair libraries with insert sizes of 3-5 Kb, 8-10 Kb and 15-20 Kb were then constructed and sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq2500 system. A total of 260 Gb (360X of the whitefly genome) high-quality cleaned data were obtained. Analysis of these genome sequences indicated the size of the whitefly genome was around 686.3-711.5 Mb. This was further confirmed by the flow cytometry analysis. De novo assembly of the Illumina short reads resulted in a draft whitefly genome of 644 Mb with N50 length of 3 Mb. This high-quality genome sequence will offer a valuable resource for researchers seeking methods to control whitefly infestation.