http://www.eje.cz bee, Apis mellifera (Linnaeus, 1758) (Hymenoptera: Apidae), was fi rst chosen for the sequencing of the whole genome after the fruit fl y Drosophila melanogaster (Diptera: Drosophilidae) (Meigen, 1830), mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Diptera: Anophelinae) (Giles, 1902) and silkworm The draft genome sequence of the Japanese honey bee, Apis cerana japonica (Hymenoptera: Apidae
In this study, we analyzed the complete mitochondrial genome of the Japanese honeybee
Apis cerana japonica
. The mitochondrial genome of
A. c. japonica
is a circular molecule of 15 917 bp and is similar to that of
A. c. cerana
. It contains 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, two rRNA genes and one A + T-rich control region. All protein-coding genes are initiated by ATT and ATG codons and are terminated by the typical stop codon TAA or TAG, except for the start codon of
ATP8
which ends with C. All tRNA genes typically form a cloverleaf secondary structure, except for
tRNA
-
Ser
(
AGN
).
The Western honeybee (Apis mellifera) is valuable in biological research and agriculture. Its genome sequence was published before those for other insect species. RNA-Seq data for A. mellifera have been applied in several recently published studies. Nevertheless, these data have not been prepared for use in subsequent meta-analyses. To promote A. mellifera transcriptome analysis, we constructed reference transcriptome data using the reference genome sequence and RNA-Seq data curated from about 1,000 runs of public databases. The new reference transcriptome data construct comprised 149,685 transcripts, and 194,174 protein sequences were predicted. Approximately 50–60% of the predicted protein sequences were functionally annotated using the protein sequence data for several model and insect species. Novel candidate immune-related transcripts were searched by meta-analysis using immune-response-related RNA-Seq and reference transcriptome data. Three to twenty candidate transcripts including autophagy-related protein 3 were upregulated or downregulated in response to both viral and bacterial infections. The constructed reference transcriptome data may facilitate future transcriptome analyses of A. mellifera.
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