Insects in Tenebrionidae have unique stress adaptations that allow them to survive temperature extremesWe report here a gene expression profiling of Microdera punctipennis, a beetle in desert region, to gain a globalview of its environmental adaptations. A total of 48,158,004 reads were obtained by transcriptome sequencing, andthe cue novo assembly yielded 56,348 unigenes with an average length of 666 bp. Based on similarity searches witha cut-off E-value of 10-5 against two protein sequence databases, 41,109 of the unigenes (about 72.96070) werematched to known proteins. An in-depth analysis of the data revealed a large number of genes were associatedwith environmental stress, including genes that encode heat shock proteins, antifreeze proteins, and enzymes suchas chitinasetrehalose, and trehalose-6-phosphate synthase. This study generatedtranscript sequences that can be used to discover novel genes associateda substantial number of M.punctipenniswith stress adaptation. Thesesequences are a valuable resource for future studies of the desert beetle and other insects in Tenebrionidae.Transcriptome analysis based on Illumina paired-end sequencing is a powerful approach for gene discovery andmolecular marker development for non-model species.