About BugAtlas

The Project

This resource results from a project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (UK) and FAPESP (the São Paulo Research Foundation). It involved Aniruddha Pandit, Shireen Davies and Julian Dow at the University of Glasgow, Celso Omoto and Fernando Consoli of the University of São Paulo and Chris Bass at the University of Exeter.

The Insects

Euschistus heros and Spodoptera frugiperda are two insects that are serious agricultural pests in various regions of the world, particularly in Brazil. The rationale of this project was that a better understanding of their genomics and physiology — especially of the gut — will lead to new methods of controlling them.

BugAtlas Databases

The primary component of the databases are libraries of RNA contigs constructed from RNAseq reads, expressly for this project. For each contig, the nearest annotated sequence matches were identified and these details included in the database. Not all contigs have such annotations.

Searching BugAtlas

TEXT searches allow one to use any of the terms that one might expect to find in the annotation of related genes, e.g. gene name, SwissProt ID, GO term, enzyme EC number or Kegg pathway ID. The tissue-specific expression is presented for every contig containing these search terms.

SEQUENCE searches are used to find the expression of an uncharacterized gene of known sequence. Protein or DNA sequences are subjected to initial BLAST searches (tBLASTn or BLASTn, respectively) and a table of hits presented. The degree of similarity between the query and the contig can be examined, and the tissue-specific expression data retrieved for contigs of interest.