Transcriptomic Resources for the Novel Coleopteran Models

26. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not. Abstract: 27 Despite recent efforts to sample broadly across metazoan and insect diversity, current 28 sequence resources in the Coleoptera do not adequately describe the diversity of the clade. 29 Here we present deep, staged transcriptomic data for two coleopteran species, Atrachya 30 menetriesi (Faldermann 1835) and Callosobruchus maculatus (Fabricius 1775). Our sampling 31 covered key stages in ovary and early embryonic development in each species. We utilized this 32 data to build combined assemblies for each species which were then analysed in detail. The 33 combined A. menetriesi assembly consists of 228,096 contigs with an N50 of 1,598 bp, while 34 the combined C. maculatus assembly consists of 128,837 contigs with an N50 of 2,263 bp. For 35 these assemblies, 34.6% and 32.4% of contigs were identified using Blast2GO, and 97% and 36 98.3% of the BUSCO set of metazoan orthologs were present, respectively. We also carried out 37 manual annotation of developmental signalling pathways and found that nearly all expected 38 genes were present in each transcriptome. Our analyses show that both transcriptomes are of 39 high quality. Lastly, we performed read mapping utilising our timed, stage specific RNA samples 40 to identify differentially expressed contigs. The resources presented here will provide a firm 41 basis for a variety of experimentation, both in developmental biology and in comparative 42 genomic studies. 43 44