BMC Genomics BioMed Central Research article Open Access EST and microarray analysis of horn development in Onthophagus beetles Teiya Kijimoto1, James Costello1,2, Zuojian Tang3, Armin P Moczek1 and Justen Andrews*1 Address: 1Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA, 2School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA and 3Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA Email: Teiya Kijimoto -
[email protected]; James Costello -
[email protected]; Zuojian Tang -
[email protected]; Armin P Moczek -
[email protected]; Justen Andrews* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 30 October 2009 Received: 23 March 2009 Accepted: 30 October 2009 BMC Genomics 2009, 10:504 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-10-504 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/10/504 © 2009 Kijimoto et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The origin of novel traits and their subsequent diversification represent central themes in evo-devo and evolutionary ecology. Here we explore the genetic and genomic basis of a class of traits that is both novel and highly diverse, in a group of organisms that is ecologically complex and experimentally tractable: horned beetles. Results: We developed two high quality, normalized cDNA libraries for larval and pupal Onthophagus taurus and sequenced 3,488 ESTs that assembled into 451 contigs and 2,330 singletons.