RNA sequencing reveals differential thermal regulation mechanisms between sexes of Glanville fritillary butterfly in the Tianshan Mountains, China

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• 作者：Ying Lei ; Yang Wang ; Virpi Ahola ; Shiqi Luo ; Chongren Xu…
• 关键词：The Glanville fritillary butterfly ; RNA ; seq ; De novo ; Thermal tolerance
• 刊名：Molecular Biology Reports
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：December 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：43
• 期：12
• 页码：1423-1433
• 全文大小：3,094 KB
• 刊物类别：Biomedical and Life Sciences
• 刊物主题：Life Sciences
  Animal Anatomy, Morphology and Histology
  Animal Biochemistry
  
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-4978
• 卷排序：43

文摘

The Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia; Nymphalidae) has been extensively studied as a model species in metapopulation ecology. We investigated in the earlier studies that female butterflies exhibit higher thermal tolerance than males in the Tianshan Mountains of China. We aim to understand the molecular mechanism of differences of thermal responses between sexes. We used RNA-seq approach and performed de novo assembly of transcriptome to compare the gene expression patterns between two sexes after heat stress. All the reads were assembled into 84,376 transcripts and 72,701 unigenes. The number of differential expressed genes (DEGs) between control and heat shock samples was 175 and 268 for males and females, respectively. Heat shock proteins genes (hsps) were up-regulated in response to heat stress in both males and females. Most of the up-regulated hsps showed higher fold changes in males than in females. Females expressed more ribosomal subunit protein genes, transcriptional elongation factor genes, and methionine-rich storage protein genes, participating in protein synthesis. It indicated that protein synthesis is needed for females to replace the damaged proteins due to heat shock. In addition, aspartate decarboxylase might contribute to thermal tolerance in females. These differences in gene expression may at least partly explain the response to high temperature stress, and the fact that females exhibit higher thermal tolerance.