The Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri, is an insect vector that transmits Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus, the causal agent of the Huanglongbing (HLB), or citrus greening disease. This disease has devastated Florida’s citrus industry, and threatens California’s industry as well as other citrus producing regions around the world. To find novel solutions to the disease, a better understanding of the vector is needed. The D. citri genome has been used to identify and characterize genes involved in Wnt signaling pathways. Wnt signaling is utilized for many important biological processes in metazoans, such as patterning and tissue generation. Curation based on RNA sequencing data and sequence homology confirms 24 Wnt signaling genes within the D. citri genome, including homologs for beta-catenin, Frizzled receptors, and seven Wnt-ligands. Through phylogenetic analysis, we classify D. citri Wnt ligands as Wg/Wnt1, Wnt5, Wnt6, Wnt7, Wnt10, Wnt11, and WntA. The D. citri version 3.0 genome with chromosomal length scaffolds reveals a conserved Wnt1-Wnt6-Wnt10 gene cluster with a gene configuration like that in Drosophila melanogaster. These findings provide greater insight into the evolutionary history of D. citri and Wnt signaling in this important hemipteran vector. Manual annotation was essential for identifying high quality gene models. These gene models can be used to develop molecular systems, such as CRISPR and RNAi, which target and control psyllid populations to manage the spread of HLB. Manual annotation of Wnt signaling pathways was done as part of a collaborative community annotation project.
Diaphorina citri is the insect vector of Huanglongbing (HLB), a disease that has devastated global citrus production. In an effort to better understand the insects biology, the D. citri genome has been manually annotated. Here, we report on D. citri genes involved in both canonical and noncanonical Wnt signaling. In metazoans, Wnt signaling is important for many biological processes such as patterning, cell polarity, tissue generation, and stem cell maintenance. We have curated a complete repertoire of Wnt signaling genes in D. citri. In total, 24 genes associated with canonical and noncanonical Wnt signaling have been annotated including seven Wnt ligands, three frizzled homologs, arrow, and several receptor tyrosine kinases such as ROR and doughnut. We were unable to find Wnt8/D, Wnt9, and Wnt16 along with the various ligand genes that have been lost to insects such as Wnt2-4. The mechanisms of canonical Wnt signaling appear to be mostly conserved and comparable to that found in the model organism, Drosophila melanogaster.
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