How an insect evolves to become a successful herbivore is of profound biological and practical importance. Herbivores are often adapted to feed on a specific group of evolutionarily and biochemically related host plants, but the genetic and molecular bases for adaptation to plant defense compounds remain poorly understood.
P. xylostella has become the most destructive pest of economically important food crops, including rapeseed, cauliflower and cabbage. This insect is the first species to have evolved resistance to dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in the 1950s and to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins in the 1990s and has developed resistance to all classes of insecticide, making it increasingly difficult to control.
A strain of the diamondback moth (DBM) (Fuzhou-S), P. xylostella, was reared on radish seedlings without exposure to insecticides for 5 years, spanning at least 100 generations. An inbred line was developed by successive single-pair sibling matings. Male pupae were used for genome sequencing.
DNA from the diamondback moth was collected in Fuzhou, China. We sequenced the 0.34 Gb genome to a depth of approximately 131.2 X with short reads from a series of libraries with various insert sizes ( 250bp and 500bp libraries per fosmid clone) on a HiSeq 2000 sequencer.
The assembled scaffolds have an N50 of 0.7 Mb. We identified 18,071 protein-coding genes.

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Accessions (data generated as part of this study):

BioProject: PRJNA78271

Accessions (data referenced by this study):

SRA: SRP006371

Projects: