Transcriptomic Features and Odorant Receptor Discovery in the Endangered Predatory Beetle Damaster mirabilissimus mirabilissimus

ABSTRACT We generated a de novo transcriptome for the endangered predatory ground beetle Damaster mirabilissimus mirabilissimus using the Illumina HiSeq 4000 platform (150‐bp paired‐end). Sequencing produced 66,553,052 raw reads (≈10 Gbp), of which 66,253,375 remained after quality filtering. Trinity assembly yielded an N50 of 2643 bp. Assembly completeness assessed with BUSCO (Insecta_odb9 dataset; 1367 orthologs) indicated 96.5% complete and 3.1% missing genes, supporting high overall quality. Functional annotation was performed against the PANM, Swiss‐Prot, UniGene, and KOG databases, and functional classification employed KOG, Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), and InterProScan. We further identified 2050 transcriptome‐derived simple sequence repeats (SSRs), with the dinucleotide motif AC being the most frequent ( n = 77). Collectively, this dataset provides a primary functional‐genomic resource for a nonmodel, threatened insect lacking a reference genome, delivers a candidate set for chemosensory gene families, including odorant receptors (ORs), and establishes a foundation for subsequent in vitro deorphanization and field‐based chemical‐ecology validation.