Authors: Ying Lei Yang Wang Virpi Ahola Shiqi Luo Chongren Xu Rongjiang Wang
Publish Date: 2016/09/20
Volume: 43, Issue: 12, Pages: 1423-1433
Abstract
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 RNAseq 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 84376 transcripts and 72701 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 upregulated in response to heat stress in both males and females Most of the upregulated hsps showed higher fold changes in males than in females Females expressed more ribosomal subunit protein genes transcriptional elongation factor genes and methioninerich 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 toleranceThis work was funded by the Grants 30470286 30670332 and the ChinaFinland Collaboration Project 30211130505 from the National Natural Science Foundation of China the project 6082012 supported by Beijing Natural Science Foundation We thank BIOPIC for RNAseq sequencing and Center of Bioinformatics of Peking University for providing the server We also thank Fuchou Tang Xiaomeng Liu Yang Ding and Chao Zhang from Peking University and Xin Zhou and Shanlin Liu from BGI who provided technical support in the transcriptome analysis In addition we thank Yuping Meng Zijuan Cao and Jianing Yang for butterfly rearing
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