Gonadotropic hormones coordinate processes in diverse tissues regulating animal reproductive physiology and behavior. Juvenile hormone (JH) is the ancient and most common gonadotropin in insects, but not in advanced eusocial honey bees and some ants. To start probing the evolutionary basis of this change, we combined endocrine manipulations, transcriptomics, and behavioral analyses to study JH regulated processes in a bumble bee showing a relatively simple level of eusociality. We found that in worker fat body, more JH-regulated genes were up- rather than down-regulated, and enriched for metabolic and biosynthetic pathways. This transcriptomic pattern is consistent with earlier evidence that JH is the major gonadotropin in bumble bees. In the brain, more JH-regulated genes were down- rather than up-regulated and enriched for protein turnover pathways. Brain ribosomal protein gene expression shows a similar trend of downregulation in dominant workers, which naturally have high JH titers. In other species, similar downregulation of protein turnover is found in aging brains or under stress, associated with compromised long-term memory and health. These findings suggest a previously unknown gonadotropin-mediated tradeoff. Analysis of published data reveals no such downregulation of protein turnover pathways in the brain of honey bee workers, which exhibit more complex eusociality and in which JH is not a gonadotropin but rather regulates division of labor. These results suggest that the evolution of complex eusociality in honey bees was associated with modifications in hormonal signalling supporting extended and extremely high fertility while reducing the ancient costs of high gonadotropin titers to the brain.
Pubmed ID: 32860832 RIS Download
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Software package that creates genomic builds, calls SNPs, detects indels, and counts reads from data generated from one or more sequencing runs. In addition, CASAVA automatically generates a range of statistics, such as mean depth and percentage chromosome coverage, to enable comparison with previous builds or other samples. CASAVA analyzes sequencing reads in three stages: * FASTQ file generation and demultiplexing * Alignment to a reference genome * Variant detection and counting
View all literature mentionsSoftware package for high-performance read alignment, quantification and mutation discovery.General purpose read aligner which can be used to map both genomic DNA-seq reads and RNA-seq reads. Subread aligner as fast, accurate and scalable read mapping by seed-and-vote.These programs were also implemented in Bioconductor R package Rsubread.
View all literature mentionsA read summarization program, which counts mapped reads for the genomic features such as genes and exons.
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