Cameron, RC, Duncan, EJ and Dearden, PK (2013) Biased gene expression in early honeybee larval development. BMC Genomics, 14. 903. ISSN 1471-2164
Abstract
Background: Female larvae of the honeybee (Apis mellifera) develop into either queens or workers depending on nutrition. This nutritional stimulus triggers different developmental trajectories, resulting in adults that differ from each other in physiology, behaviour and life span. Results: To understand how these trajectories are established we have generated a comprehensive atlas of gene expression throughout larval development. We found substantial differences in gene expression between worker and queen-destined larvae at 6 hours after hatching. Some of these early changes in gene expression are maintained throughout larval development, indicating that caste-specific developmental trajectories are established much earlier than previously thought. Within our gene expression data we identified processes that potentially underlie caste differentiation. Queen-destined larvae have higher expression of genes involved in transcription, translation and protein folding early in development with a later switch to genes involved in energy generation. Using RNA interference, we were able to demonstrate that one of these genes, hexamerin 70b, has a role in caste differentiation. Both queen and worker developmental trajectories are associated with the expression of genes that have alternative splice variants, although only a single variant of a gene tends to be differentially expressed in a given caste. Conclusions: Our data, based on the biases in gene expression early in development together with published data, supports the idea that caste development in the honeybee consists of two phases; an initial biased phase of development, where larvae can still switch to the other caste by differential feeding, followed by commitment to a particular developmental trajectory.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2013, Cameron et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to 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. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
Keywords: | Caste development; Larval development; Gene expression; Apis mellifera |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Jul 2016 10:01 |
Last Modified: | 11 Apr 2018 13:23 |
Published Version: | http://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-14-903 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | BioMed Central |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/1471-2164-14-903 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:97704 |
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