The first dataset of de novo assembled transcriptome of Aspidiotus destructor Signoret (Hemiptera: Diaspididae)

Coconut, <i>Cocos nucifera</i> L., is the top agricultural export of the Philippines with about 1.2 billion pesos in value. The Philippine coconut industry, however, has been under major threat from an outbreak of the armored coconut scale insects. There are two species believed to cause an outbreak: <i>Aspidiotus destructor</i> Signoret and <i>Aspidiotus rigidus</i> Reyne<i>.</i> These are sibling species and are hard to differentiate using morphological identification. In fact, <i>A. rigidus</i> was once thought to be a subspecies of <i>A. destructor</i> and was misidentified as <i>A. destructor</i> during the early phases of the coconut scale insect outbreak because it is the only known species native to the Philippines. <i>Aspidiotus rigidus</i> has recently been identified as an invasive species and found to be the cause of the outbreak. The native species <i>A. destructor</i> should not be overlooked as a subject of research since it is still present alongside the <i>A. rigidus</i>, and it continues to infest several perennial crops. The need for a research approach of these insects at the molecular level has required the use of transcriptomics. Transcriptome datasets offer a way at investigating how genes are expressed, how species differ from each other, and how phenotypes came to be, among others. Transcriptomics offers such deeper understanding and can be used to develop methods for pest management. Because <i>A. rigidus</i> transcriptome has recently become available, it is imperative to have the dataset for its sibling species, <i>A. destructor</i>. This serves as a foundational resource; the first publicly available transcriptome assembly for the species. This will provide additional knowledge on how the two sibling species differ and assess their capacity to cause outbreak. The data here represents the first transcriptome profile of the <i>A. destructor</i> using Illumina HiSeq 4000 paired- end sequencing. Pair-end reads were assembled <i>de novo</i> with Trinity. Raw fastq reads have been deposited in NCBI-SRA (SRR17085744 and SRR17085743). The Trinity-based transcriptome assembly have also been deposited in the NCBI-SRA (SUB10341747). Two additional assemblies were also generated and have been deposited in NCBI-SRA: an assembly clustered using CD-HIT-EST (SUB10341752) and an assembly sorted according to its longest assembly via a custom script (SUB10341753).