Dataset Information

Stage- and sex-specific transcriptome analyses reveal distinctive sensory gene expression patterns in a butterfly.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Animal behavior is largely driven by the information that animals are able to extract and process from their environment. However, the function and organization of sensory systems often change throughout ontogeny, particularly in animals that undergo indirect development. As an initial step toward investigating these ontogenetic changes at the molecular level, we characterized the sensory gene repertoire and examined the expression profiles of genes linked to vision and chemosensation in two life stages of an insect that goes through metamorphosis, the butterfly Bicyclus anynana.

Results

Using RNA-seq, we compared gene expression in the heads of late fifth instar larvae and newly eclosed adults that were reared under identical conditions. Over 50 % of all expressed genes were differentially expressed between the two developmental stages, with 4,036 genes upregulated in larval heads and 4,348 genes upregulated in adult heads. In larvae, upregulated vision-related genes were biased toward those involved with eye development, while phototransduction genes dominated the vision genes that were upregulated in adults. Moreover, the majority of the chemosensory genes we identified in the B. anynana genome were differentially expressed between larvae and adults, several of which share homology with genes linked to pheromone detection, host plant recognition, and foraging in other species of Lepidoptera.

Conclusions

These results revealed promising candidates for furthering our understanding of sensory processing and behavior in the disparate developmental stages of butterflies and other animals that undergo metamorphosis.

SUBMITTER: Ernst DA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8327453 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Similar Datasets

Project description:Social insects dominate arthropod communities worldwide due to cooperation and division of labor in their societies. This, however, makes them vulnerable to exploitation by social parasites, such as slave-making ants. Slave-making ant workers pillage brood from neighboring nests of related host ant species. After emergence, host workers take over all nonreproductive colony tasks, whereas slavemakers have lost the ability to care for themselves and their offspring. Here, we compared transcriptomes of different developmental stages (larvae, pupae, and adults), castes (queens and workers), and sexes of two related ant species, the slavemaker Temnothorax americanus and its host Temnothorax longispinosus. Our aim was to investigate commonalities and differences in group-specific transcriptomes, whereupon across-species differences possibly can be explained by their divergent lifestyles. Larvae and pupae showed the highest similarity between the two species and upregulated genes with enriched functions of translation and chitin metabolism, respectively. Workers commonly upregulated oxidation-reduction genes, possibly indicative of their active lifestyle. Host workers, but not workers of the slavemaker, upregulated a "social behavior" gene. In slavemaker queens and workers, genes associated with the regulation of transposable elements were upregulated. Queens of both species showed transcriptomic signals of anti-aging mechanisms, with hosts upregulating various DNA repair pathways and slavemaker queens investing in trehalose metabolism. The transcriptomes of males showed enriched functions for quite general terms realized in different genes and pathways in each species. In summary, the strong interspecific commonalities in larvae, pupae, and workers were reflected in the same enriched Gene Ontology (GO) terms. Less commonalities occurred in the transcriptomes of queens and males, which apparently utilize different pathways to achieve a long life and sperm production, respectively. We found that all analyzed groups in this study show characteristic GO terms, with similar patterns in both species.

Project description:BackgroundThe bacterium Salmonella enterica includes a diversity of serotypes that cause disease in humans and different animal species. Some Salmonella serotypes show a broad host range, some are host restricted and exclusively associated with one particular host, and some are associated with one particular host species, but able to cause disease in other host species and are thus considered "host adapted". Five Salmonella genome sequences, representing a broad host range serotype (Typhimurium), two host restricted serotypes (Typhi [two genomes] and Paratyphi) and one host adapted serotype (Choleraesuis) were used to identify core genome genes that show evidence for recombination and positive selection.ResultsOverall, 3323 orthologous genes were identified in all 5 Salmonella genomes analyzed. Use of four different methods to assess homologous recombination identified 270 genes that showed evidence for recombination with at least one of these methods (false discovery rate [FDR] <10%). After exclusion of genes with evidence for recombination, site and branch specific models identified 41 genes as showing evidence for positive selection (FDR <20%), including a number of genes with confirmed or likely roles in virulence and ompC, a gene encoding an outer membrane protein, which has also been found to be under positive selection in other bacteria. A total of 8, 16, 7, and 5 genes showed evidence for positive selection in Choleraesuis, Typhi, Typhimurium, and Paratyphi branch analyses, respectively. Sequencing and evolutionary analyses of four genes in an additional 42 isolates representing 23 serotypes confirmed branch specific positive selection and recombination patterns.ConclusionOur data show that, among the four serotypes analyzed, (i) less than 10% of Salmonella genes in the core genome show evidence for homologous recombination, (ii) a number of Salmonella genes are under positive selection, including genes that appear to contribute to virulence, and (iii) branch specific positive selection contributes to the evolution of host restricted Salmonella serotypes.