Comparative Transcriptome Analysis of Queen, Worker, and Larva of Asian Honeybee, Apis cerana

Abstract

The Asian honeybee, Apis cerana, is a native honeybee species in Korea which is important in agriculture for pollination and honey production. For better understanding of the physiology of A. cerana, high-throughput Illumina transcriptome sequencing was performed to analyze the gene expression profiles of queen, worker, and larva. A total of 219,799,682 clean reads corresponding to 22.2 Gb of nucleotide sequences was obtained from the whole body total RNA samples. The Apis mellifera reference mRNA sequence database was used to measure the gene expression level with Bowtie2 and eXpress software, and the Illumina short reads were then mapped to 11,459 out of 11,736 A. mellifera reference genes. Total of 9,221 genes with FPKM value greater than 5 of each sample group were subjected to eggNOG with BLASTX for gene ontology analysis. The differential gene expression between queen and worker, and worker and larva were analyzed to screen the overexpressed genes in each sample group. In the queen and worker sample group, total of 1,766 genes were differentially expressed with 887 and 879 genes overexpressed over two folds in queen and worker, respectively. In the worker and larva sample group, total of 1,410 genes were differentially expressed with 1,009 and 401 genes overexpressed over two folds in worker and larva, respectively. IntroductionApis cerana, the Asian honeybee is a native bee species to eastern and southeastern Asian countries such as Korea, China, and Japan. In Korea, A. cerana is one of the most important honeybee species along with western honeybee, Apis mellifera because not only of the economic importance of honey production, but also the importance as one of the pollinator species in agriculture. Also A. cerana had been concerned of its strong resistance to the ectoparasitic mites (Peng et al., 1987).However, the recent outbreak of sacbrood virus (SBV) belonging to the genus Iflavirus which infects A. cerana (Choi et al., 2010) caused a devastating colony loss of Korean honeybee industry.SBV infected larva fails to pupate, and accumulates virus enriched ecdysal fluid beneath its unshed skin (Bailey et al., 1964). SBV also infects adult bees, however, the mortality

Elucidation of Gene Expression Patterns in the Brain after Spinal Cord Injury

“…This successive cluster generation using reagents was provided by the Illumina® TruSeq™ (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA) RNA Sample Preparation Kit. 22 – 25 We performed the transcriptome analysis by the following procedures: RNA-seq experiment and data handling procedure. The detailed procedures of RNA-seq experiment are performed following the manufacturer’s instruction.…”

Chromosome-level genome assembly, annotation, and phylogenomics of the gooseneck barnaclePollicipes pollicipes

“…This is true even when compared to transcriptional differences typically seen in other arthropods with profound metamorphoses, such as holometabolous insects. For example, in Anopheles [ 142 ], Apis [ 143 ], Drosophila [ 144 ], and other insects [ 145–147 ], typically ∼3–30% of their genes are differentially expressed between larva and adult stages compared to the 48% of genes observed here in P. pollicipes . Stark differences in the biology of the nauplius and adult barnacle stages appear to be reflected in drastic transcriptomic differences both in the degree of expression of nearly half of their genes, as well as the number of genes (>4,000) that exhibited stage-specific expression (Fig.…”