Bioinformatics analysis of differential gene expression in heads of Apis cerana cerana and Apis mellifera ligustica foragers

摘要

@@The honey bee is regarded as a model organism in many fields of biology by virtue of its striking social behaviors. Given the differences in ecology and biology between Apis cerana cerana (Acc) and Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml), we first used the Illumina-Solexa deep sequencing technology that is based on 21bp cDNA tags to describe the differences in the heads of Acc and Aml foragers at the gene expression level. We obtained～3.6 million clean tags of Acc, and～4.2 million clean tags of Aml. Functional annotation of gene sequences originated from clean tags mentioned above were identified by gene ontology terms (GO) database. Both an FDR < 0.01 and the criterion of an at least 2-fold expression difference as the threshold was used to judge expression differences, there were 244 genes expressed significantly in Aml, however, which were not expressed in Acc. Similarly, there were 125 genes expressed significantly in Acc, which were not found in Aml. In addition, we found 1287 genes which were down-regulated in the heads of Aml foragers, but upregulated in Acc.