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-da...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.展开更多
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)+3 种基金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).
文摘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.
