Transcriptional identification of differentially expressed genes associated with division of labor in Apis cerana cerana  

作　　者：Yi-Jie Chen Ying-Jiao Li Shuang Wu Wen-Chao Yang Jing Miao Shao-Hua Gu Jiang-Hong Li Xiao-Qing Miao Xianchun Li 

机构地区：[1]College of Bee Science,Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University,Fuzhou,China [2]State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests,Institute of Plant Protection,Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences,Beijing,China [3]Department of Entomology and BI05 Institute,University of Arizona,Tucson,AZ,USA

出　　处：《Insect Science》2021年第2期457-471,共15页昆虫科学（英文版）

基　　金：This work was supported by the China Ministry of Agriculture Fujian Honeybee Biology Observation Station grant(2015-350426-G1203-053);National Natural Science Foundation of China(31401737,31171874 and 31321004);Beijing talents fund(2015000021223ZK29);Beijing Nova Program(Z1511000003150118);US Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture(hatch grant ARZT-1360890-H31-164 and multi state grant ARZT-1370400-R31-168);State Key Laboratory for Biology and of Plant Diseases and Insects(SKLOF201402 and SKLOF201504).

摘　　要：Workers of Apis cerana cerana undergo an in-hive nursing to outdoor foraging transition,but the genes underlying this age-related transition remain largely unknown.Here,we sequenced the head transcriptomes of its 7-day-old normal nurses,18-and 22-day-old normal foragers,7-day-old precocious foragers and 22-day-old over-aged nurses to unravel the genes associated with this transition.Mapping of the sequence reads to Apis mellifera genome showed that the three types of foragers had a greater percentage of reads from annotated exons and intergenic regions,whereas the two types of nurses had a greater percentage of reads from introns.Pair-and group-wise comparisons of the five transcriptomes revealed 59 uniquely expressed genes(18 in nurses and 41 in foragers)and 14 nurse-and 15 forager-upregulated genes.The uniquely expressed genes are usually low-abundance long noncoding RNAs,transcription factors,transcription coactivators,RNA-binding proteins,kinases or phosphatases that are involved in signaling and/or regulation,whereas the nurse-or forager-upregulated genes are often high-abundance downstream genes that directly perform the tasks of nurses or foragers.Taken together,these results suggest that the nurse-forager transition is coordinated by a social signal-triggered epigenetic shift from introns to exons/intergenic regions and the resulting transcriptional shift between the nurse-and forager-associated genes.

关 键 词：behavioral transition epigenetic shift IncRNA over-aged nurses precocious foragers signaling genes 

分 类 号：Q96[生物学—昆虫学]