Expression profiles during honeybee caste determination.docVIP

/2000/2/1/research/0001.1 Research Expression profiles during honeybee caste determination Jay D Evans* and Diana E Wheeler? Addresses: *Bee Research Lab, USDA-ARS, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA. VDepartment of Entomology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. Correspondence: Jay D Evans. E-mail: evansj@ Published: 20 December 2000 Received: 6 October 2000 Revised: 8 November 2000 Accepted: 9 November 2000 GenomeBiology 2000, 2(1):research0001.1–0001.6 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2000/2/1/research/0001 ? GenomeB (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) Abstract Background: Depending on their larval environment, female honeybees develop into either queens or workers. As in other polyphenisms, this developmental switch depends not on genomic differences between queens and workers but on the differential expression of entire suites of genes involved with larval fate. As such, this and other polyphenic systems can provide a novel tool for understanding how genomes and environmental conditions interact to produce different developmental trajectories. Here we use gene-expression profiles during honeybee caste determination to present the first genomic view of polyphenic development. Results: Larvae raised as queens or workers differed greatly in their gene-expression patterns. Workers remained more faithful than queens to the expression profiles of younger, bipotential, larvae. Queens appeared to both downregulate many of the genes expressed by bipotential larvae and turn on a distinct set of caste-related genes. Queens overexpressed several metabolic enzymes, workers showed increased expression of a member of the cytochrome P450 family, hexameric storage proteins and dihydrodiol dehydrogenase, and young larvae overexpressed two putative heat-shock proteins (70 and 90 kDa), and several proteins