| Summary: | The Asian corn borer moth <i>Ostrinia furnacalis</i> is an important lepidopteran pest of maize in Asia. Odorant-degrading enzymes (ODEs), including carboxylesterases (CCEs), glutathione <i>S</i>-transferases (GSTs), cytochrome P450s (CYPs), UDP-glycosyltransferases (UGTs), and aldehyde oxidases (AOXs), are responsible for rapid inactivation of odorant signals in the insect antennae. In this study, we performed a transcriptome assembly for the antennae of <i>O. furnacalis</i> to identify putative ODE genes. Transcriptome sequencing revealed 35,056 unigenes, and 21,012 (59.94%) of these were annotated by searching against the reference sequences in the NCBI non-redundant (NR) protein database. For functional classification, these unigenes were subjected to Gene Ontology (GO), Eukaryotic Orthologous Groups (KOG), and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) annotations. We identified 79 genes encoding putative ODEs: 19 CCEs, 17 GSTs, 24 CYPs, 13 UGTs, and 6 AOXs. BLASTX best hit results indicated that these genes shared quite high amino acid identities with their respective orthologs from other lepidopteran species. Reverse transcription-quantitative PCR showed that <i>OfurCCE2</i>, <i>OfurCCE5</i>, and <i>OfurCCE18</i> were enriched in male antennae, while <i>OfurCCE7</i> and <i>OfurCCE10</i> were enriched in female antennae. <i>OfurCCE14</i> and <i>OfurCCE15</i> were expressed at near-equal amounts in the antennae of both sexes. Our findings establish a solid foundation for future studies aimed at understanding the olfactory functions of these genes in <i>O. furnacalis</i>.
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