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
• 来源期刊: 中国昆虫科学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（2）
• 所属期刊栏目: Original articles
• 页码范围: 457-471
• 页数: 15页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1111/1744-7917.12773

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 reg-ulation,whereas the nurse-or forager-upregulated genes are often high-abundance down-stream 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.