Aphid Transcriptomics – Past, Present and Future

Rapid development of cost-effective new sequencing technologies with improved sensitivity have led to the advent of the transcriptomic era in organismal research. Hundreds of organisms and their specialized tissues have been subjected to transcriptomic analysis to understand the functional genetics associated with environmental stress, disease state, and specific developmental stages. Transcriptomics complements whole genome sequencing analysis and is an effective method to denote functions to unannotated genes. The earliest transcriptome studies involved preparation of complementary DNA (cDNA) libraries and Sanger sequencing to generate expression sequence tags (ESTs) for a subset of the transcripts.