Genome and Genetic Engineering of the House Cricket (Acheta domesticus): Applications for Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

The house cricket, Acheta domesticus, is one of the most farmed insects worldwide and the foundation of an emerging industry for the use of insects as a sustainable food source. Edible insects present a promising alternative for protein production amid a plethora of recent reports on climate change and biodiversity loss largely driven by agriculture. As with other agricultural crops, genetic resources are needed to improve crickets for food and other applications. We present the first high quality annotated genome assembly of A. domesticus which was assembled from long read data and scaffolded to chromosome level from long range data, providing information on promoters and genes needed for genetic manipulation. Gene groups that may be useful for improving the value of these insects to farmers were manually annotated, mainly genes related to immunity. Metagenome scaffolds in the A. domesticus assembly, including those from bacteria, other microbes and viruses such as Invertebrate Iridescent Virus 6 (IIV6), were submitted in a separate accession as host-associated sequences. We demonstrate both CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knock-in and knock-out of selected genes and discuss implications for the food, pharmaceutical and other industries. RNAi was demonstrated to disrupt the function of the vermilion eye-color gene to produce a useful white-eye biomarker phenotype. We are utilizing these data to develop base technologies and methodologies for downstream commercial applications, including the generation of more nutritious and disease resistant crickets as well as lines producing valuable bioproducts such as vaccines and antibiotics. We also discuss how this foundational research can play a critical role in utilizing the largest, most diverse yet almost entirely untapped biological resource on Earth: Class Insecta.

A long-read draft assembly of the Chinese mantis (Mantodea: Mantidae:Tenodera sinensis) genome reveals patterns of ion channel gain and loss across Arthropoda

“…Additional species of interest not present in the database (Hermetia illucens, BioProject: PRJEB37575; Tenebrio molitor, BioProject: PRJNA820846; Manduca sexta, BioProject: PRJNA658700; Penaeus vannamei, BioProject: PRJNA438564; Acheta domesticus, BioProject: PRJNA706033; Bombyx mandarina, BioProject: PRJDB13954; Generalovic et al 2021, Kaur et al 2023, Gershman et al 2021, Zhang et al 2019, Dossey et al 2022, Xiang et al 2018 were manually added to our list by functionally annotating available protein sequences using eggnog-mapper, which uses the eggnog5.0 database to identify orthologous gene families. Aceta domesticus did not have publicly available protein sequences, thus we structurally annotated it using Helixer v0.3.1 (Stiehler et al 2020;Holst et al 2023) before functional annotation.…”