Parasitic Wasp Genome Project

Image source: M.E.Clark.URoch1 at en.wikipedia (Own work) [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

About the Project

The BCM-HGSC sequenced three species of parasitic wasp: Nasonia vitripennis, Nasonia giraulti, and Nasonia longicornis.

Nasonia is a genus containing these three parasitic wasps whose hosts include house flies and other filth flies.

It is a genetic model for all parasitic wasps that are used in the biological control of insect pests. Because of its usable haploid genetics, Nasonia is a facile model for discovering the genes behind complex traits. Nasonia will be the second representative of the Hymenoptera to be sequenced at the BCM-HGSC.

N. vitripennis has been sequenced using a WGS strategy with a six-fold sequence coverage, whereas N. giraulti and N. longicornis are being sampled at single-fold sequence coverage, and will be aligned to the N. vitripennis assembly to identify and localize sequence markers necessary for mapping quantitative traits to individual gene loci.

The sequencing strains for N. vitripennis, N. giraulti, and N. Longicornis were provided by John (Jack) Werren who was lead author on the Nasonia genome white paper.

Further details on the biology of Nasonia can be found here.

Funding for this project has been provided by: the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI U54 HG003273), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Genomic Resources

Comparative Genome Sequence Alignments

  • We have updated our comparative genome sequence alignments of the giraulti and longicornis genomes to the vitripennis reference genome, and produced BAM files.

  • This will enable easier processing of the alignments using the SAMTOOLS and GATK and other software suites, and easier visualization of the alignments using IGV (the integrated genome viewer).

  • Find Bam files, indexes, consensus sequences, and the commands used to generate them.

Additional Resources

Learn more about the parasitic wasp