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Long live the queen, the king and the commoner? Transcript expression differences between old and young in the termite Cryptotermes secundus.

José Manuel Monroy Kuhn | Karen Meusemann | Judith Korb
PloS one | 2019

Social insects provide promising new avenues for aging research. Within a colony, individuals that share the same genetic background can differ in lifespan by up to two orders of magnitude. Reproducing queens (and in termites also kings) can live for more than 20 years, extraordinary lifespans for insects. We studied aging in a termite species, Cryptotermes secundus, which lives in less socially complex societies with a few hundred colony members. Reproductives develop from workers which are totipotent immatures. Comparing transcriptomes of young and old individuals, we found evidence for aging in reproductives that was especially associated with DNA and protein damage and the activity of transposable elements. By contrast, workers seemed to be better protected against aging. Thus our results differed from those obtained for social insects that live in more complex societies. Yet, they are in agreement with lifespan estimates for the study species. Our data are also in line with expectations from evolutionary theory. For individuals that are able to reproduce, it predicts that aging should only start after reaching maturity. As C. secundus workers are immatures with full reproductive options we expect them to invest into anti-aging processes. Our study illustrates that the degree of aging can differ between social insects and that it may be associated with caste-specific opportunities for reproduction.

Pubmed ID: 30759161

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This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


BLASTX (tool)

RRID:SCR_001653

Web application to search protein databases using a translated nucleotide query. Translated BLAST services are useful when trying to find homologous proteins to a nucleotide coding region. Blastx compares translational products of the nucleotide query sequence to a protein database. Because blastx translates the query sequence in all six reading frames and provides combined significance statistics for hits to different frames, it is particularly useful when the reading frame of the query sequence is unknown or it contains errors that may lead to frame shifts or other coding errors. Thus blastx is often the first analysis performed with a newly determined nucleotide sequence and is used extensively in analyzing EST sequences. This search is more sensitive than nucleotide blast since the comparison is performed at the protein level.

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DAVID (tool)

RRID:SCR_001881

Bioinformatics resource system including web server and web service for functional annotation and enrichment analyses of gene lists. Consists of comprehensive knowledgebase and set of functional analysis tools. Includes gene centered database integrating heterogeneous gene annotation resources to facilitate high throughput gene functional analysis.

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European Molecular Biology Laboratory (tool)

RRID:SCR_004473

Intergovernmental organisation funded by public research money from its member states in Europe. Groups and laboratories perform basic research in molecular biology and molecular medicine, training for scientists, students and visitors. Provides development of services, new instruments and methods, data and technology in its member states.

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Pfam (tool)

RRID:SCR_004726

A database of protein families, each represented by multiple sequence alignments and hidden Markov models (HMMs). Users can analyze protein sequences for Pfam matches, view Pfam family annotation and alignments, see groups of related families, look at the domain organization of a protein sequence, find the domains on a PDB structure, and query Pfam by keywords. There are two components to Pfam: Pfam-A and Pfam-B. Pfam-A entries are high quality, manually curated families that may automatically generate a supplement using the ADDA database. These automatically generated entries are called Pfam-B. Although of lower quality, Pfam-B families can be useful for identifying functionally conserved regions when no Pfam-A entries are found. Pfam also generates higher-level groupings of related families, known as clans (collections of Pfam-A entries which are related by similarity of sequence, structure or profile-HMM).

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Hmmer (tool)

RRID:SCR_005305

Tool for searching sequence databases for homologs of protein sequences, and for making protein sequence alignments. It implements methods using probabilistic models called profile hidden Markov models (profile HMMs). Compared to BLAST, FASTA, and other sequence alignment and database search tools based on older scoring methodology, HMMER aims to be significantly more accurate and more able to detect remote homologs because of the strength of its underlying mathematical models. In the past, this strength came at significant computational expense, but in the new HMMER3 project, HMMER is now essentially as fast as BLAST.

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InterProScan (tool)

RRID:SCR_005829

Software package for functional analysis of sequences by classifying them into families and predicting presence of domains and sites. Scans sequences against InterPro's signatures. Characterizes nucleotide or protein function by matching it with models from several different databases. Used in large scale analysis of whole proteomes, genomes and metagenomes. Available as Web based version and standalone Perl version and SOAP Web Service.

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InterPro (tool)

RRID:SCR_006695

Service providing functional analysis of proteins by classifying them into families and predicting domains and important sites. They combine protein signatures from a number of member databases into a single searchable resource, capitalizing on their individual strengths to produce a powerful integrated database and diagnostic tool. This integrated database of predictive protein signatures is used for the classification and automatic annotation of proteins and genomes. InterPro classifies sequences at superfamily, family and subfamily levels, predicting the occurrence of functional domains, repeats and important sites. InterPro adds in-depth annotation, including GO terms, to the protein signatures. You can access the data programmatically, via Web Services. The member databases use a number of approaches: # ProDom: provider of sequence-clusters built from UniProtKB using PSI-BLAST. # PROSITE patterns: provider of simple regular expressions. # PROSITE and HAMAP profiles: provide sequence matrices. # PRINTS provider of fingerprints, which are groups of aligned, un-weighted Position Specific Sequence Matrices (PSSMs). # PANTHER, PIRSF, Pfam, SMART, TIGRFAMs, Gene3D and SUPERFAMILY: are providers of hidden Markov models (HMMs). Your contributions are welcome. You are encouraged to use the ''''Add your annotation'''' button on InterPro entry pages to suggest updated or improved annotation for individual InterPro entries.

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QIAGEN (tool)

RRID:SCR_008539

A commercial organization which provides assay technologies to isolate DNA, RNA, and proteins from any biological sample. Assay technologies are then used to make specific target biomolecules, such as the DNA of a specific virus, visible for subsequent analysis.

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MAFFT (tool)

RRID:SCR_011811

Software package as multiple alignment program for amino acid or nucleotide sequences. Can align up to 500 sequences or maximum file size of 1 MB. First version of MAFFT used algorithm based on progressive alignment, in which sequences were clustered with help of Fast Fourier Transform. Subsequent versions have added other algorithms and modes of operation, including options for faster alignment of large numbers of sequences, higher accuracy alignments, alignment of non-coding RNA sequences, and addition of new sequences to existing alignments.

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Trimmomatic (tool)

RRID:SCR_011848

Software Java pipeline for trimming tasks for Illumina paired end and single ended data. Flexible Trimmer for Illumina Sequence Data. Pair aware preprocessing tool optimized for Illumina next generation sequencing data. Includes several processing steps for read trimming and filtering. Operating systems Unix/Linux, Mac OS, Windows.

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OrthoDB (tool)

RRID:SCR_011980

Database of orthologous protein coding genes across vertebrates, arthropods, fungi, basal metazoans, and bacteria.

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Inkscape (tool)

RRID:SCR_014479

A vector graphics software which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. It can import and export various file formats, including SVG, AI, EPS, PDF, PS and PNG. Features include object creation, object manipulation, color editing, and text editing.

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FastQC (tool)

RRID:SCR_014583

Quality control software that perform checks on raw sequence data coming from high throughput sequencing pipelines. This software also provides a modular set of analyses which can give a quick impression of the quality of the data prior to further analysis.

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BUSCO (tool)

RRID:SCR_015008

Software tool to quantitatively measure genome assembly and annotation completeness based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content.

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SeaView (tool)

RRID:SCR_015059

Graphical user interface for multiple sequence alignment and molecular phylogeny. SeaView also generates phylogenetic trees.

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DESeq2 (tool)

RRID:SCR_015687

Software package for differential gene expression analysis based on the negative binomial distribution. Used for analyzing RNA-seq data for differential analysis of count data, using shrinkage estimation for dispersions and fold changes to improve stability and interpretability of estimates.

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