Agrica

Helicoverpa armigera (Hubner), stands out as a serious agricultural menace, inflicting substantial damage to a wide range of crops, including cotton, corn, tomato, and soybean. One promising approach involves the use of entomopathogenic fungi, which are naturally occurring pathogens that infect and kill insects. Aim of this study, high-throughput sequencing and assembly techniques to investigate the transcriptome of Helicoverpa armigera. Illumina NovaSeq6000 sequencing generated a substantial number of raw reads, after filtering and quality control steps, the processed reads were subjected to de novo assembly, resulting in 30,821 contigs. In total, 84% of contigs were matched to known proteins in public databases including Nr, Gene Ontology (GO), and Cluster Orthologous Gene Database (COG), and then, contigs were mapped to 123 via functional annotation against the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway database (KEGG). In addition, we compared the ortholog gene family of the Helicoverpa armigera transcriptome to Spodoptera frugiperda, Spodoptera exigua and Spodoptera littoralis and found that 522 orthologous gene families are specific to Helicoverpa armigera. Furthermore, 1110 identified SSRs in this study holds great significance for future research involving this insect species. These findings provide valuable information that can be utilized in studying the molecular mechanisms and identifying novel functional genes associated with this insect in upcoming studies. It paves the way for investigating molecular mechanisms underlying important processes and developing pest control strategies.